Nemet, G.F., Gidden, M.J., Greene, J., Roberts, C., Lamb, W.F., Minx, J., Smith, S.M., Geden, O., Riahi, K.

Near-term deployment of novel carbon removal to facilitate longer-term deployment

in Joule, 15.11.2023

Peer Review , Applied Sustainability Sciences

Scenarios—which account for the costs of and interactions among different mitigation options—show that we will need to remove hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere over the course of the century to limit warming to well below 2°C, make efforts to limit it to 1.5°C, and ensure the sustained well-being of our planet. Yet at present, only 2 Gt is being removed per year, and nearly all of it is from forestry—only 0.1% is from novel forms of carbon removal. This commentary shows that the deployment of novel CO₂ removal (CDR) over the next decade, its formative phase, is likely to be consequential in determining whether CDR will be available at scale and in time to reach net-zero CO₂ emissions consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.