The State of CDR Report

The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) has released its comprehensive global assessment of current CDR, and it is a call to action for countries to increase their development of both conventional and innovative CDR technologies, which are vital for limiting global warming to either 1.5 or 2 C.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) involves capturing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and storing it for decades to millennia on land, in the ocean, in geological formations or in products. 

It has been labelled as a vital aspect of limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 C by the IPCC, and many countries have made pledges to capture more CO2. However, there is a gap between the amount of CO2 countries are planning to capture and what is actually needed to meet the IPCC’s Paris Agreement goal. 

Currently the vast majority of CDR (99.9% or 2 GtCO₂ per year) comes from traditional land based methods through planting trees for afforestation. The remaining 0.1% is from innovative CDR technologies like storing carbon in soil and circular products like biochar and biogases (BECCS). If we are to achieve the IPCC’s goal of a 1.5 C warming limit, the amount of carbon captured by these novel methods needs to expand exponentially within the next 30 years. 

Part of the action needed for meeting the Paris Agreement is the double traditional land-based CDR by 2050 to meet the 1.5 goal, or increase by 50% to meet the 2 degrees goal compared to 2020. Some countries have agreed to maintain or slightly increase their land-based CDR, which is a large task, but still not enough to meet these requirements. 

Additionally, further development of novel and innovative CDR technologies is vital for closing the CDR gap. The average amount of increase needed is a factor of 30 by 2030 and a factor of 1300 by 2050 in a range of different warming scenarios. No country has yet pledged to scale novel CDR by this amount within their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC - the pledges countries make to the IPCC to reduce their emissions). 

In order to meet these global climate targets, both novel and traditional methods of carbon capture need to increase by several times in the next 30 years, and countries need to make pledges to achieve this as soon as possible. CDR has already come a long way in the past 20 years, growing from a niche energy sector to a global network of communities and institutions working to limit warming and share information. This community is globally important and must continue its hard work to achieve the world’s net zero goals.