In a recently published report, Philip W. Boyd, Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Minhan Dai, Louis Legendre and Terre Satterfield from Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law have provided guidance regarding the steps that should be taken by policy-makers for the future deployment of marine CDR (mCDR) at scale.
Key takeaways from the report:
- Global CDR goals can only be reached if land-based CDR deployment is coupled with mCDR deployment due to two reasons:
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Land-based CDR methods suffer from limitations due to restricting land and water availability, altering surface albedo and jeopardizing food security. In addition, negative feedbacks such as fires can considerably decrease the capacity of land resources to sequester carbon, necessitating the use of mCDR as an ‘insurance’ tool.
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Deployment of land-based CDR removes CO2 from the atmosphere while leading the marine resources to release a portion of the CO2 that they have been storing due to human-induced activities. Similarly, mCDR can remove CO2 but triggers CO2 release from lands that have stored CO2 due to human-induced activities. The deployment of land-based CDR in conjunction with mCDR can lead to ‘compensatory CO2 release’.
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Oceans hold a considerable untapped potential for storing carbon in view of their size and depth as well as the features of their carbon cycle that enable them to preserve carbon in the ocean without releasing it into the atmosphere in gas form.
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mCDR methods are unlikely to become scalable before 2035 as studies seeking to demonstrate their safety and effectiveness are still ongoing.
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Large-scale deployment of mCDR methods should be preceded by efforts geared towards revealing their unknown aspects pertaining to their ‘integrity, sustainability, governance, social acceptability and transparency.’
Read the full post here: "The Need to Explore the Potential of Marine CDR with a One-Earth Strat" by Philip W. Boyd, Jean-Pierre Gattuso et al.