The clock is ticking: a major new report shows that up to 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be removed from the air every year in order to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.report, developed by an international team of researchers led by the University of Oxford, around 2 billion tons of CO2 are currently being removed, mainly via conventional methods like planting forests.
For this reason, countries are trying to figure out how to emit less of those planet-warming gasses, and also how to capture more of them from the air, to keep temperature rise in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change. The IPCC—the global panel of scientists that keeps governments up to date on climate research—includes carbon removal and storage in all of the scenarios it has developed to keep temperature rise below that 2-degree Celsius limit.
Given the climate impacts happening around the world at less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, researchers are extremely worried about what effects the world will see at 2 or even 3 degrees more warming, reinforcing the need for a rapid drawdown of carbon."Which CDR methods will work best is highly context-dependent and differs among countries according to geography, regional climate, infrastructure and political and societal preferences," Geden tells me.
Current investments are"a drop in the bucket on the gigaton scale we need to be thinking in terms of," says Injy Johnstone, a report co-author and a research associate at Oxford's Smith School, noting thatof the entire global energy industry."For industrial levels of carbon removal supply to be available tomorrow, we need a pipeline of equally industrially-sized investment in a diverse carbon removal portfolio today," she explains.
Given the competing pressures on carbon removal, the University of Oxford's Alexis McGivern, net zero standards manager at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, describes it as being"stuck between a rock and a hard place." But, she says, the risks of CDR must not prevent researchers assessing it.