Full Title: The Carbon Dioxide Removal Gap
Author(s): William F. Lamb, Thomas Gasser, Rosa M. Roman-Cuesta, Giacomo Grassi, Matthew J. Gidden, Carter M. Powis, Oliver Geden, Gregory Nemet, Yoga Pratama, Keywan Riahi, Stephen M. Smith, Jan Steinhauser, Naomi E. Vaughan, Harry B. Smith, and Jan C. Minx
Publisher(s): Nature Communications
Publication Date: March 17, 2024
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Rapid emissions reductions, including reductions in deforestation-basedland emissions, are the dominant source of global climate mitigation potential in the coming decades. However, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will also have an important role to play. Despite this, it remains unclear whether current national proposals for CDR align with temperature targets. Here they show the ‘CDR gap’, that is, CDR efforts proposed by countries fall short of those in integrated assessment model scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 °C. However, the most ambitious proposals for CDR are close to level sin a low-energy demand scenario with the most-limited CDR scaling and aggressive near-term emissions reductions. Further, they observe that many countries propose to expand land-based removals, but none yet commit to substantively scaling novel methods such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage, biochar or direct air carbon capture and storage.