🚰 Governments assume on-tap, large-scale CDR will save their net-zero plans

🏛️ This is my core takeaway from Harry Smith PhD’s (University of East Anglia) excellent doctoral thesis analysing 41 government Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategies (LT-LEDS) submitted to the UNFCCC.

🌍 As a reminder: LT-LEDS represent countries’ highest-level long-term climate strategies and therefore provide a clear window into current and future national climate policy.

📄 So what did the thesis find?

First, a huge over-reliance on nature based removals vis-a-vis durable removals (N = 41):

🌲 Enhanced forest sinks: mentioned in 40 strategies, quantified in 12

🌱 Soil carbon: advocated in 30, quantified in 4

🏭 BECCS: in 16, quantified in 5

💨 DACCS: in 7, quantified in 2

⚠️ Clearly natural sinks have a central role to play, but they are limited in terms of scaleability, vulnerable to reversal, and cannot lead - on their own - to geological net-zero. As such, they need to be complemented with ever increasing amounts of [diversified] durable CDR as well.

📉 A second major insight - from the broader sample of 71 LT-LEDS - is that the level of residual emissions at net-zero are rarely quantified (N = 26/71) and their range is much larger than the 5-15% commonly assumed, namely 20-33%.

🙅 What’s particularly worrying is that several strategies explicitly position CDR as a compensatory mechanism for ongoing fossil fuel emissions - a clear mitigation-deterrence risk.

So what does the paper recommend? CDR policy staples that still do not seem to be regularly used:

🎯 Establishing separate targets for reductions and removals, and within removals separate targets for NBS vs durable

🟰 Using the like-for-like principle

📋 Conducting regular residual emissions assessment

😮‍💨 My takeaway: this in-depth analysis shows how badly understood durable CDR still is, even at the highest levels of climate policy. There is a prevalent assumption that we can overrely on NBS and simply ‘open the durable CDR tap’ in the 2040s, despite having no strategy to build it now.

👏 Thanks you Harry Smith for this excellent contribution to the field and I hope many policy makers will read your thesis and - more importantly - think twice about the role of CDR in their climate strategies.

❓ What is your take? Does this resonate with your own analyses? What should the role of CDR be in these plans?

👇 Link to full paper in the comments

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