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PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate, Ecology and People
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fclim.2024.1516823
This article is part of the Research Topic Ecosystem Technology and Climate Adaptation View all articles

Synthetic Biology Approaches to Negative Emissions Technologies: A Technological and Ethical Appraisal

Provisionally accepted
Dominic Logel Dominic Logel Josh Wodak Josh Wodak *
  • Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This article explores the impact that synthetic biology approaches may have on Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). Synthetic biology has both altered and created biological pathways inspired by nature to develop new NETs that sequester greenhouse gases into industrially useful chemicals, such as biomass and calcium carbonate. However, synthetic biology continues to encounter difficulties when implementing and scaling up production due to a combination of hard limits (within biology) and 'soft' limits (of social and economic costs).Additionally, NETs, along with Ecosystem Technologies in general, operate as climate technofixes, wherein insufficient thought is given to the ethical quandaries arising from releasing designed organisms into the environment, even under controlled conditions. In this paper, we provide a technological and ethical appraisal of synthetic biology approaches to NETs, in the context of climate change mitigation through Ecosystem Technology.

    Keywords: Synthetic Biology, Negative emissions technologies, Carbon Capture Technologies, carbon fixation, environmental ethics

    Received: 25 Oct 2024; Accepted: 20 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Logel and Wodak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Josh Wodak, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.