ENGINEERED SOIL CARBON SYSTEMS FOR SUSTAINABLE CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

Abstract

The escalating global carbon crisis is driving a shift from conventional, passive soil carbon sequestration towards actively engineered carbon management with greater efficiency and permanence. This review presents Engineered Soil Carbon Systems (ESCS), an emerging interdisciplinary approach combining enhanced rock weathering, engineered biological systems, advanced carbon-stabilizing materials, and digital monitoring technologies to strengthen terrestrial carbon capture and storage. Passive soil carbon sequestration remains constrained by finite mineral surface saturation, microbial priming, and the temporal instability of organic carbon pools. ESCS applies enhanced rock weathering using reactive silicate minerals such as basalt, olivine, and wollastonite to accelerate mineral dissolution, producing pedogenic carbonates and mineral-associated organic carbon that persist over long timescales. Alongside this, engineered biological approaches, including synthetic microbial consortia and CRISPR-based metabolic engineering, raise the rate of atmospheric CO₂ fixation and redirect carbon towards more stable biomass and soil carbon pools, while engineered nanomaterials and mineral-biochar composites further slow the breakdown of stored carbon. These advances are supported by IoT-enabled sensors, hyperspectral remote sensing, and machine learning, which allow soil carbon changes to be tracked and verified with greater accuracy, forming the basis for reliable monitoring, reporting, and verification. This review synthesizes these developments to position ESCS as a verifiable, efficient, and technologically grounded pathway for long-term soil carbon mitigation, while also highlighting the environmental, biosafety, and regulatory challenges that must be addressed for its wider field-scale adoption.