Sustainability Through Bio-Agriculture: Carbon Dioxide Reduction (CDR) Plus Biodiversity Recovery

Climate change has caused tremendous concerns in many societies on all continents. However, the decline in biodiversity, which is at least as serious a crisis, is mostly ignored. An increasing number of technological approaches for carbon dioxide reduction (CDR), which are in fact geoengineering, are being studied, partially at the pilot scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports technologies such as direct air capture (DAC), carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the use of captured CO2 (CCU). A new concept for objectively judging “sustainability” is described: entropy as a generally applicable criterion for sustainability, followed by an analysis of whether CDR technologies are sustainable. It becomes clear that such technologies are seriously unsustainable. Therefore, after the CDR potential of natural ecosystems is explored, the contributions of bioagriculture to CO2 capture and long-term storage (deeply in soil) are shown, as well as their impact on biodiversity recovery via fully integrated bioagriculture – which proves to be sustainable according to the entropy criterion. Practical examples are taken from the German Kattendorf biofarm (450 hectares leased pastures and fields). Their experience with solar and bioenergy will be reported, bird/plant species diversity will be detailed for selected areas, and CO2eq emissions vs. storage figures will be given for milk production, cheese manufacturing and for the whole farm. CDR by natural/renaturalized ecosystems, including bioagriculture, is not only sustainable but also much more capable than CDR technologies and contributes to biodiversity recovery, in contrast to technological approaches. We must address species decline and climate change without mitigating one crisis with approaches that exacerbate the other.