Carbon Dioxide Removal Must Be Scaled Responsibly. But What Does That Mean?

 

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has grown from a little-known concept to a fast-growing field in the last several years. Beyond the climate benefits from removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, many CDR approaches may also benefit people and the environment, like creating jobs to boosting soil health or reducing local ocean acidification. However, CDR projects can also come with unintended consequences or negative impacts, so robust governance frameworks must be in place to minimize any damages.

Comprehensive and fit-for-purpose governance frameworks are needed, for example, so that oil and gas industries don’t rely on CDR to justify their continued fossil fuel production. These frameworks can also help protect communities that already face increased pollution and harm from the fossil fuel industry from additional risks tied to land, water and energy use that may come from these new CDR facilities.

As the carbon removal industry ramps up, there is a growing emphasis on “responsible” carbon removal to ensure communities don’t experience harm and have access to local benefits. But what does this mean concretely? In the context of ensuring robust governance, what can be done to improve policy and regulation to deliver responsible outcomes?

Here, we answer some of these questions.

What Does Responsible Carbon Removal Entail?

Responsible carbon removal emphasizes the importance of sustainably and safely deploying a range of CDR approaches that use chemicals, rocks, biomass, soils, the ocean and more to complement efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions without exacerbating any historical harms to communities or the environment.

At a project level, this includes thoroughly assessing the social, economic and environmental impacts of CDR projects and minimizing negative effects while equitably distributing benefits. At a policy level, it entails the creation of policies and regulations that ensure that CDR contributes to real climate benefits, while protecting communities and ecosystems.

Achieving responsible carbon removal therefore requires robust governance to minimize these trade-offs. In addition to its global climate benefit, it must deliver local tangible benefits like improvements to air quality or revenue to invest into communities and ecosystems rather than exacerbate inequities or environmental harms of other industries. It must also entail inclusive decision-making and complement — not substitute — ambitious emissions reductions.

Without public trust and community support, CDR projects may struggle to gain any social license and scale, limiting their ability to contribute to climate goals. For instance, other clean energy projects that did not adequately engage communities have faced delays or cancellations. Ensuring responsible implementation by industry and governments is therefore key to building that trust.

Key Questions to Inform Responsible CDR Policy

Below we answer three key questions about the role of policymaking to ensure the responsible deployment of CDR.

How Can Policies Ensure that CDR Maximizes its Benefit to the Climate?

Scientific consensus is clear: Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be necessary to complement efforts that drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century to prevent further unprecedented warming across the Earth. There are however various concerns (including from academics and NGOs), ranging from the risk of delaying emissions reductions, to the need for more accurate measurements of projects’ net climate benefits. Some policy measures and safeguards can help address these risks:

Setting Separate Targets

Without adequate policy measures in place, scaling CDR in the next decades could risk shifting focus and resources away from the urgent need to reduce emissions today and transition away from fossil fuels. This risk is known as mitigation deterrence.

Separate long-term climate targets for emissions reduction and CDR can help address this risk, with some U.S. states, like California and Washington, providing early examples. This might be more easily achieved in states or countries with net-zero policies and greenhouse-gas reduction mandates, through which the role of CDR can be responsibly defined.

Under this approach, CDR is planned and accounted for separately based on a quantitative assessment of expected residual emissions. This clarifies how much CDR is planned to reach net-zero, ensuring transparency and preventing CDR from being misused to offset emissions that could instead be reduced.

Policymakers must refrain from planning for CDR to sustain fossil fuel use, which would undermine emissions reduction efforts and risk derailing climate targets. Emitting CO2 now and removing it later does not prevent its consequences: CO2 emissions cause irreversible climate damage, which CDR cannot undo.

Scaling CDR will also be constrained by sustainability limits on land, water and energy availability as well as societal impacts.

Lastly, CDR technologies are still largely in development. There is uncertainty as to the extent to which they will scale in the coming decades. Relying on the promise of a massive scale up to address residual emissions is therefore risky, highlighting the need to rapidly reduce emissions to the maximum extent possible.

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Ed Miliband vows to engage with China on climate after Tory ‘negligence’

Energy security and net zero secretary travels to Beijing for countries’ first formal climate meetings since 2017

Ed Miliband has accused the previous Conservative government of negligence for failing to engage with China on climate issues, as he travelled to Beijing for the countries’ first formal climate meetings since 2017.

The secretary of state for energy security and net zero was in Beijing to announce a new annual UK-China climate dialogue. The first summit will take place in London later this year. China’s minister of ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, is expected to attend.

The dialogue “is an essential start to putting an end to what I call the previous strategy of negligence”, Miliband said. He said the new annual summit represented “a strategy of committed engagement”.

The dialogue will allow ministers and officials to share experiences on issues such as energy market reform, carbon capture and storage, domestic climate goals and other issues related to the clean energy transition. It will be the first regular dialogue to be held at secretary of state level.

Miliband stressed that “the world is way off track from where we need to be” before the Cop30 UN climate summit in Brazil in November. He said that in his first eight months as secretary of state, he had visited Brazil, India and China, showing that “Britain is back as a climate leader” on the world stage. The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and developing countries, to counter Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies in the US.

Asked about how Britain could show leadership on sensitive areas in China’s energy transition, such as human rights, Miliband declined to give details.

Campaigners have highlighted that nearly half of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, a crucial raw material for solar panels, comes from Xinjiang, a region of China where there are credible reports of forced labour for Uyghurs and other minorities via “surplus labour” programmes in which workers are transferred to work in other parts of the country. China says the labour initiatives are voluntary and aimed at tackling poverty.

Miliband said: “The issue of forced labour is absolutely something I’ve raised and it is a concern in the UK … I raised it with my Chinese hosts.” He said China “will continue to play a really important role in solar production”.

The government’s massive investments in the solar industry mean that China dominates about 80% of the total supply chain, with western leaders concerned about oversupply driving down prices.

Miliband also addressed the issue of coal phase-out in China. Despite the country’s huge rise in clean energy production, Beijing remains committed to coal, and recently pledged “increase coal production and supply capacity” to ensure energy security.

“We obviously want China and all countries indeed to move away from fossil fuels,” Miliband said. He said that he believed the Chinese side “sees renewables as the kind of driver of the system” and fossil fuels as the “underlying backup”.

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