In a recently published article entitled ‘Carbon Dioxide Removal: What Is Sustainable and Just?’, Duncan McLaren and Olaf Corry have laid down some of the ambiguities in relation to the potential deployment of CDR during the next 25 years. In doing so, they have explored the main societal and ecological damages that may emerge if CDR deployment grows at a fast pace as a substitute for efforts underway to cut emissions.
Key takeaways from the article:
- The necessity for CDR as a tool for countering climate change should be reduced to the greatest extent possible. Efforts geared towards achieving emission cuts should reach to the highest attainable level and the pace at which the use of fossil fuels is terminated should increase. The achievement of this outcome can increase the use of renewable energy.
- Policies that explicitly seek to attain equitable and sustainable CDR while disincentivizing overreliance on CDR must be developed. To this end, targets and accounting mechanisms should be set for CDR that are distinct from those that pertain to emission cuts so as to ensure that emission cuts and CDR are not considered to be interchangeable. In addition, different goals should be set for natural and technological CDR methods.
- Policies should be put in place that seek to have CDR utilized to make up for the impacts of ‘legitimate residual emissions’ that are difficult to eliminate and serve certain societal purposes.
- Deployment of CDR projects that can remove low amounts of carbon in an equitable and sustainable manner should be incentivized. To this end, support should be conditioned upon the deployment of such projects in an equitable manner, particularly in the Global South.
- Incentives for sustainable CDR should place an emphasis upon co-benefits. Offsetting structures that enable the amount and qualitative features of CDR to be determined by the market should not be utilized.
Read the full paper here: Carbon Dioxide Removal: What Is Sustainable and Just?