Matthias Honegger

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which emerged in climate models as a largely abstract idea, has evolved into a set of specific methods and spawned calls for supportive policies. Industrial approaches through the use of biomass combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), as well as direct air capture with storage (DACS) compete for scarce resources. We examine emerging conflicts that shape policy design to mobilize industrial removals by examining ideas, institutions, and interests and their interplay, conflicts, and alignments. We base our analysis on semi-structured interviews and stakeholder workshops in addition to emerging CDR policy literature. Arguably, technology developers, industry, civil society, and policymakers put forward ideas in a way that tends to advance their interests over others. Dominant ideas of CDR methods – including the notion that these would inherently be done at a large scale – have proven challenging to forming constructive policy discussion and made unhelpful generalizations of environmental performance, social desirability, or scalability of entire CDR methods. We outline opportunities and barriers to advance sound policies that scale the removal of CO₂ effectively, efficiently, and fairly by outlining synergies, trade-offs, and conflicts in the current policymaking landscape of BECCS and DACS.

Successful development of CCU and CCS hubs and clusters is as much a technological challenge as it is a non-technical challenge. Non-technical challenges across social and political aspects, economics, monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), as well as legal, regulatory and contractual aspects all can become showstoppers if they are not given the due careful attention. Non-technical challenges tend not to predetermine success. Instead, they represent malleable and dynamic factors that evolve over time in response to broader changes in narratives, politics, evolving planning processes, and other regulatory requirements. Attending to non-technical challenges – particularly through proactive measures (e.g. engaging with regulators) requires time, which unless planned for carefully – alongside engineering and business development efforts – may add to the time required for achieving operation through the stages of scoping, planning, and implementation. The proposed talk will outline some of the most prominently discussed challenges across the various non-technical areas – as identified in the first part of the project CCUS ZEN toward identification of promising CCUS hubs and clusters in selected European regions especially regarding potential challenges in the Baltic Sea region.

International carbon markets are potentially a very powerful tool for mobilizing carbon dioxide removal in line with Paris Agreement ambitions to limit global warming to well below 2°C. This requires reaching global net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. Yet, carbon market regulators have not approached removals in a systematic manner. This review assesses the highly fragmented treatment of removals under compliance and voluntary carbon markets, including baseline, credit and cap-and-trade systems. The Kyoto mechanisms and the large voluntary carbon market standards have long focussed on biological removals without inherent storage permanence and only recently started to develop methodologies for removals with geological storage, mineralization or biochar. Driven by high prices for credits from emerging removal technologies and advance market commitment initiatives targeting high permanence removals, various newcomers in voluntary markets are currently establishing their own approaches for generating removal credits. However, they disregard key concepts safeguarding market quality such as additionality, which risks triggering scandals and tainting the entire market for removal credits. Given the diversity of credit prices spanning three orders of magnitude from 1 to 1000, as well as of volumes ranging from a few hundred to tens of millions of credits, the current “gold rush” atmosphere of removal markets needs to quickly be replaced by a coordinated approach, ensuring credibility, and enabling removals to play the required role in reaching global net zero.

Carbon dioxide removal technologies are gaining prominence in academia, industry and policy, yet the need for substantial funding raises serious challenges. This comment outlines these issues and charts a path for the effective, systematic and fair mobilization of funds for removals. Carbon dioxide removal technologies are gaining prominence in academia, industry and policy, yet the need for substantial funding raises serious challenges. This comment discusses these issues and offers suggestions for future funding efforts in this area.

Climate change mitigation actions, including those aimed at developing and scaling carbon dioxide removal (CDR) activities spanning the industrial, energy, and agroforestry sector, emerge in a context of internationally shared norms that include governance objectives, legal provisions and informal expectations, and societal expectations. Established governance principles provide normative orientation for policy including when targeting the development and scaling of CDR. Knowledge of these principles can guide effective discussion and evaluation of policy options. To facilitate discussion of mitigation options among experts and CDR practitioners, this study excerpts governance principles from legislative texts, the climate governance literature, and the CDR literature with relevance to CDR policy considerations. To illustrate the relevance of the governance principles found for evaluating policy options, we apply them to three technology groups of CDR: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS), and forestry. This exercise indicates the importance of more intensive attention to the normative dimension of mitigation policies in ongoing deliberative and planning processes. Such efforts can help disentangle normative and factual dimensions and sources of (dis)agreement on the role of CDR in specific climate policy contexts.

Solar radiation modification, particularly stratospheric aerosol injection, holds the potential to reduce the impacts of climate change on sustainable development, yet could itself generate negative impacts and is subject to intense scholarly debate based on relatively little evidence. Based on expert elicitation involving over 30 individuals with backgrounds across the domains of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we identify a broad range of potential implications of solar radiation modification for the SDGs. Depending on design and application scenarios, applications could potentially assist in the pursuit of several of the goals by limiting temperature rise and limiting acceleration in atmospheric water cycles as well as extreme weather events. However, by adding to particulates, introducing an additional layer of complexity and potential for conflict in global governance, as well as otherwise altering planetary environments, they might also detract from the pursuit of SDGs and introduce novel risks. The overall impact of solar radiation modification on sustainable development is currently highly uncertain and dependent on climate change mitigation pathways and governance. We identify key areas for further transdisciplinary research the pursuit of which might reduce some uncertainty and help inform emerging governance processes.