Carbon Dioxide Removal
In recent years, Carbon Dioxide Removal has emerged as an area of focus in climate policy – first in academia as a new form of climate change mitigation and increasingly in countries’ and industries’ mitigation commitments, policies, investments, and implementation efforts. Perspectives has pioneered this topic from its origins to the present moment of accelerating implementation as part of larger carbon management efforts with its critical but constructive research and advisory.
Our contributions examine questions of sustainability and other social desirability, explore with stakeholders the various challenges and opportunities for fair and efficient policy design and advance real-world implementation of carbon management including through European and global cooperation on storage of CO2 as well as its capture through biological and engineered pathways.
The project “Carbon Dioxide Removal Policies and Ethics (CDR-PoEt),” funded by the German Government, examines how policies could induce scaling of CDR as part of a holistic mitigation policy ensemble in a fair and efficient manner. Through workshops and research contributions the consortium of five research institutions and think tanks develops possible avenues for government action that narrows the gap between aspiration and action toward credible mitigation policy implementation in Germany, the EU, and globally.
CCS, CCU and removals related innovation and piloting projects such as the Swiss projects DemoUpCarma, DECIRRA, and the Horizon Europe projects CCUS ZEN and COREU allow us to work with partners in academia and industry to figure out avenues toward broadly-supported, accountable, and functioning business cases also in the context of capture and storage hubs and clusters in Europe including by leveraging carbon market revenue through robust and consistent monitoring, reporting and verification.
The topic of carbon dioxide removals has long been held back by disagreement over its appropriate role in climate policy. Through our work we seek to untangle normative disagreement to point out constructive paths forward in which disagreement does not result in broadly undesirable gridlock, but rather is truly acknowledged so that common ground can be identified.
