Advocating afforestation, betting on BECCS: land-based negative emissions technologies (NETs) and agrarian livelihoods in the global South

McElwee, Pamela

doi:10.1080/03066150.2022.2117032

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 170 publications

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“…We have explained why this is so in our paper on the so-called 'failed land deals' (Borras et al, 2022b). It is also likely that the land rush will continue to gain momentum given the land-oriented solutions to climate change being popularly adopted in the Conference of the Parties (COP) processes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) (Franco and Borras, 2021;McElwee, 2022).…”

Section: The Contemporary Global Land Rushmentioning

confidence: 93%

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

M.,

2023

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

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Section: The Contemporary Global Land Rushmentioning

confidence: 93%

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

M.,

2023

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

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“…NDCs are required under the Paris Agreement and currently represent short-term commitments by countries up to 2030. Reviews of NDCs note that many include increased forest and soil carbon as near-term mitigation options 3,36,37 , whilst the consideration of engineered-CDR is limited 2,38 . The shorter-term mechanism of NDCs are ill-suited to consider CDR, which is primarily used in the national context to counterbalance residual emissions from difficult to decarbonise sectors to reach net-zero 13 .…”

Section: Role and Relevance Of Long-term National Climate Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term national climate strategies bet on forests and soils to reach net-zero

Smith

Vaughan

Forster

2022

Commun Earth Environ

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The deployment of carbon dioxide removal is essential to reach global and national net-zero emissions targets, but little attention has been paid to its practical deployment by countries. Here, we analyse how carbon dioxide removal methods are integrated into 41 of the 50 Long-term Low Emission Development Strategies submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), before 2022. We show that enhancing forest and soil carbon sinks are the most advocated strategies but are only explicitly quantified in 12. Residual emissions by 2050 are only quantified in 20 strategies and most of them use forests to achieve national net-zero targets. Strategies that quantify both residual emissions and carbon dioxide removal identify national constraints, such as wildfire risks to forests and limited geological CO2 storage capacity. These strategies also highlight the need for international cooperation. Taken together, we suggest that the UNFCCC should urgently strengthen its reporting requirements on long-term national climate strategies.

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“…Furthermore, if deployed at the scale specified in the 1.5 °C scenarios, land-based or terrestrial CDR (tCDR) such as BECCs would compete with other demands for land. Given that most of the biomass provided for BECCS in ambitious mitigation scenarios is projected to come from the Global South (Daioglou et al, 2020;Fajardy et al, 2021), biomassbased CDR options have been identified as an agrarian challenge that would be imposed on developing countries (McElwee, 2022) that have contributed little to causing the problem. Therefore, the drive to develop and use tCDR options may provide an excuse for some parties to ride rough-shod over the land rights of indigenous communities, smallholders, or other local communities (Bluwstein & Cavanagh, 2023), as has happened in the past (Neudert & Voget-Kleschin, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassessing the need for carbon dioxide removal: moral implications of alternative climate target pathways

Voget-Kleschin,

Baatz,

Heyward

et al. 2024

Glob. Sustain.

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Non-technical summary Scenarios compatible with the Paris agreement's temperature goal of 1.5 °C involve carbon dioxide removal measures – measures that actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere – on a massive scale. Such large-scale implementations raise significant ethical problems. Van Vuuren et al. (2018), as well as the current IPCC scenarios, show that reduction in energy and or food demand could reduce the need for such activities. There is some reluctance to discuss such societal changes. However, we argue that policy measures enabling societal changes are not necessarily ethically problematic. Therefore, they should be discussed alongside techno-optimistic approaches in any kind of discussions about how to respond to climate change. Technical summary The 1.5 °C goal has given impetus to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, such as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or afforestation. However, land-based CDR options compete with food production and biodiversity protection. Van Vuuren et al. (2018) looked at alternative pathways including lifestyle changes, low-population projections, or non-CO2 greenhouse gas mitigation, to reach the 1.5 °C temperature objective. Underlined by the recently published IPCC AR6 WGIII report, they show that demand-side management measures are likely to reduce the need for CDR. Yet, policy measures entailed in these scenarios could be associated with ethical problems themselves. In this paper, we therefore investigate ethical implications of four alternative pathways as proposed by Van Vuuren et al. (2018). We find that emission reduction options such as lifestyle changes and reducing population, which are typically perceived as ethically problematic, might be less so on further inspection. In contrast, options associated with less societal transformation and more techno-optimistic approaches turn out to be in need of further scrutiny. The vast majority of emission reduction options considered are not intrinsically ethically problematic; rather everything rests on the precise implementation. Explicitly addressing ethical considerations when developing, advancing, and using integrated assessment scenarios could reignite debates about previously overlooked topics and thereby support necessary societal discourse. Social media summary Policy measures enabling societal changes are not necessarily as ethically problematic as commonly presumed and reduce the need for large-scale CDR.

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Advocating afforestation, betting on BECCS: land-based negative emissions technologies (NETs) and agrarian livelihoods in the global South

Cited by 9 publications

References 170 publications

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles

Long-term national climate strategies bet on forests and soils to reach net-zero

Reassessing the need for carbon dioxide removal: moral implications of alternative climate target pathways

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