Harnessing Radiation-Use Efficiency to Enhance Crop Yields and Soil Carbon Sequestration in the North China Plain

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture requires simultaneously increasing food production and mitigating climate change, yet the extent to which crop improvement strategies deliver co-benefits at regional scales remains poorly understood. Improving radiation-use efficiency (RUE) has been widely proposed as a pathway to increase crop productivity, but its potential benefits such as soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration are not well understood. Here, we developed a hybrid modeling framework that integrates a process-based agricultural system model (APSIM) with machine learning to capture genetic × environment × management (G × E × M) interactions and their effects on crop yield and SOC dynamics across the North China Plain. The results show that improving RUE increases both crop yields and SOC, but the magnitude of these benefits is strongly modulated by nitrogen inputs and varies widely across the region. In the future period (2021–2060) under a moderate-emissions scenario SSP2-4.5, increasing RUE of current cultivars by 10% and 20% led to additional wheat yield gains of 1.1 (+16%) and 1.8 t ha−1 (+26%) and maize gains of 0.8 (+11%) and 1.1 t ha−1 (+14%), respectively. These productivity gains also translated into an increase in SOC sequestration (+10% and +26%, respectively), as a consequence of enhanced carbon inputs. Notably, the coupling between yield gains and SOC sequestration varied substantially across the region, indicating spatially differentiated benefits. Our results highlight that improving RUE can contribute to both productivity and soil carbon gains, but these co-benefits are not universal and depend on local environmental and management contexts. This study provides a scalable and feasible approach for evaluating crop improvement strategies and their environmental consequences represented by SOC dynamics, as well as demonstrate that RUE improvement offers great opportunities for sustainable agriculture.