This article makes an early attempt at connecting political science insights on the politics of carbon sequestration to a growing demand for knowledge about the potentials of negative emissions. Negative emissions from sequestering carbon is likely to be vital for fulfilling the 2C target. Thus, this article is a reality check on what states actually plan to do. Based on key states' nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the international climate regime and off-therecord interviews with senior country representatives to the November 2016 climate meeting in Marrakech, we find that states generally do not have policies to promote large-scale carbon sequestration or negative emissions. However, many states wish to make the most of terrestrial sinks, using current regime rules as part of their mitigation portfolios. With Putnam's two-level game as our theoretical vantage point, we suggest that national strategies to promote negative emissions will remain absent until the international climate regime formalizes rules and incentives for such efforts, recognizing them as legitimate national contributions. Without a governance framework that admits such efforts, national initiatives on large-scale negative emissions cannot fulfill the purpose of climate policy in a two-level setting matching national interests and international commitments.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.