Land-based negative emissions: risks for climate mitigation and impacts on sustainable development

Dooley, Kate; Kartha, Sivan

doi:10.1007/s10784-017-9382-9

Cited by 94 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Further, we assume that the ratcheting mechanisms of the Paris Agreement will lead to further mitigation ('ratcheting success'), including shifting the target date of the current NDCs from 2030 to 2025, early move from a trajectory consistent with NDC implementation to a more ambitious trajectory, and increasing the rate of GHG emission reduction after implementation of the current NDCs. Finally, the scenario assumptions differ regarding constraints we place upon CDR: allCDR, has a full portfolio of CDR options (supplementary text 7, section 3.6; [8, 21-25, 27, 28]); limCDR ('limited' CDR), where CDR is limited to reforestation and afforestation, while other approaches are deferred until proven [17]; and noCDR, where no additional CDR (besides the afforestation pledged in China's NDC) develops, following the suggestion of [12]. Table 1 summarizes the main assumptions and constraints used in the scenarios.…”

Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, the question arises how much CDR can be conservatively assumed to be implemented in a world serious about mitigation. For the limCDR scenario, we follow [17] who estimate a CDR potential that is screened for social, environmental and technical risks, and compatibility with the Sustainable Development Goals. Lastly, as an additional boundary case it is useful to consider near-term emission reduction in a scenario where CDR is widely deployed: The allCDR scenario features a comprehensive CDR portfolio, with the maximum scale of each CDR approach derived from the literature (supplementary text 7, section 3.6).…”

Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Near-term emission reductions in this scenario can be understood as the minimum level of ambition required to limit warming to 1.5 • C, under very optimistic assumptions with regards to CDR. Note that because the potential and risks of CDR technologies are poorly known today, the allCDR scenario violates the precautionary principle as advocated by [12,17].…”

Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within a given carbon budget, more CDR deployment leads to less stringent near-term mitigation pathways. However, there are concerns that BECCS, or other CDR approaches, will not be able to deliver sequestration at the scales assumed-for example if they are limited by technological feasibility, land availability and competition with food crops, or storage permanence [5,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Thus, embarking now on pathways with these relatively lenient near-term emission reductions that are conditional on the assumption of large-scale future CDR deployment, could lead to an irreversible breach of the pursued carbon budget should this deployment prove unachievable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, embarking now on pathways with these relatively lenient near-term emission reductions that are conditional on the assumption of large-scale future CDR deployment, could lead to an irreversible breach of the pursued carbon budget should this deployment prove unachievable. Some scholars advocate for a precautionary approach to CDR in mitigation scenario design: 'the mitigation agenda should proceed on the premise that [CDR] will not work at scale' [12], while others suggest a more moderately precautionary approach that only considers CDR approaches and deployment scales that are least vulnerable to the above-mentioned risks [17]. This letter focusses on the relationship between levels of CDR deployment on one hand and near-term stringency of emission reductions on the other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Ratcheting ambition to limit warming to 1.5 °C – trade-offs between emission reductions and carbon dioxide removal

Holz

Siegel²,

Johnston³

et al. 2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Mitigation scenarios to limit global warming to 1.5 • C or less in 2100 often rely on large amounts of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which carry significant potential social, environmental, political and economic risks. A precautionary approach to scenario creation is therefore indicated. This letter presents the results of such a precautionary modelling exercise in which the models C-ROADS and En-ROADS were used to generate a series of 1.5 • C mitigation scenarios that apply increasingly stringent constraints on the scale and type of CDR available. This allows us to explore the trade-offs between near-term stringency of emission reductions and assumptions about future availability of CDR. In particular, we find that regardless of CDR assumptions, near-term ambition increase ('ratcheting') is required for any 1.5 • C pathway, making this letter timely for the facilitative, or Talanoa, dialogue to be conducted by the UNFCCC in 2018. By highlighting the difference between net and gross reduction rates, often obscured in scenarios, we find that mid-term gross CO 2 emission reduction rates in scenarios with CDR constraints increase to levels without historical precedence. This in turn highlights, in addition to the need to substantially increase CO 2 reduction rates, the need to improve emission reductions for non-CO 2 greenhouse gases. Further, scenarios in which all or part of the CDR is implemented as non-permanent storage exhibit storage loss emissions, which partly offset CDR, highlighting the importance of differentiating between net and gross CDR in scenarios. We find in some scenarios storage loss trending to similar values as gross CDR, indicating that gross CDR would have to be maintained simply to offset the storage losses of CO 2 sequestered earlier, without any additional net climate benefit.

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Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Ratcheting ambition to limit warming to 1.5 °C – trade-offs between emission reductions and carbon dioxide removal

Holz

Siegel²,

Johnston³

et al. 2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Contested framings of greenhouse gas removal and its feasibility: Social and political dimensions

Waller

Rayner

Chilvers

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

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Prospective approaches for large‐scale greenhouse gas removal (GGR) are now central to the post‐2020 international commitment to pursue efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C. However, the feasibility of large‐scale GGR has been repeatedly questioned. Most systematic analyses focus only on the physical, technical, and economic challenges of deploying it at scale. However, social and political dimensions will be just as important, if not more so, to how possible futures play out. We conduct one of the first reviews of the international peer‐reviewed literature pertaining to the social and political dimensions of large‐scale GGR, with a specific focus on two predominant approaches: Biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation/reforestation (AR). Our analysis of 78 studies proposes two important insights. First, it shows how six key social and political dimensions of GGR feasibility–namely economics and incentives; innovation; societal engagement; governance; complexity and uncertainty; and ethics, equity, and justice–are identifiable and are emphasized to varying degrees in the literature. Second, there are three contested ways in which BECCS and AR and their feasibility are being framed in the literature: (a) a techno‐economic framing; (b) a social and political acceptability framing; and (c) a responsible development framing. We suggest this third frame will, and indeed should, become increasingly pertinent to the assessment, innovation, and governance of climate futures. This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior.

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Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

Carton

Asiyanbi

Beck

et al. 2020

WIREs Climate Change

147

100

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Recent IPCC assessments highlight a key role for large-scale carbon removal in meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This focus on removal, also referred to as negative emissions, is suggestive of novel opportunities, risks, and challenges in addressing climate change, but tends to build on the narrow techno-economic framings that characterize integrated assessment modeling. While the discussion on negative emissions bears important parallels to a wider and older literature on carbon sequestration and carbon sinks, this earlier scholarship-particularly from the critical social sciences-is seldom engaged with by the negative emissions research community. In this article, we survey this "long history" of carbon removal and seek to draw out lessons for ongoing research and the emerging public debate on negative emissions. We argue that research and policy on negative emissions should proceed not just from projections of the future, but also from an acknowledgement of past controversies, successes and failures. In particular, our review calls attention to the irreducibly political character of carbon removal imaginaries and accounting practices and urges acknowledgement of past experiences with the implementation of (small-scale) carbon sequestration projects. Our review in this way highlights the importance of seeing continuity in the carbon removal discussion and calls for more engagement with existing social science scholarship on the subject. Acknowledging continuity and embracing an interdisciplinary research agenda on carbon removal are important aspects in making climate change mitigation research more responsible, and a precondition to avoid repeating past mistakes and failures.

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Land-based negative emissions: risks for climate mitigation and impacts on sustainable development

Cited by 94 publications

References 40 publications

Ratcheting ambition to limit warming to 1.5 °C – trade-offs between emission reductions and carbon dioxide removal

Ratcheting ambition to limit warming to 1.5 °C – trade-offs between emission reductions and carbon dioxide removal

Contested framings of greenhouse gas removal and its feasibility: Social and political dimensions

Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

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