IPCC WGIII Report Affirms the Necessity for CDR to Meet Goals of the Paris Agreement

Two opposing mega-trends are highlighted by the IPCC Working Group III report, one a cause for grave alarm, one a cause for hope. This report finds we are currently heading very fast towards global warming of 1.5°C. And the current pledges by countries would take us significantly well beyond the 1.5°C target. 

A major takeaways from this report indicate that we must dramatically phase down fossil fuels and stop new fossil-fuel infrastructure.  However, at the same time as we phase down fossil fuels, the IPCC report finds that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is required to counterbalance hard-to-abate sectors of the economy and to limit warming to 1.5°C. The IPCC report affirms that carbon removal is especially important to counterbalance hard-to-abate sectors, like steel production and long-haul aviation. 

For a more extensive look into the finding of this report, please see our “Key Findings for Carbon Dioxide Removal.”

Here is a summary of some key points:

The IPCC Working Group III report affirms that carbon removal will be critical to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, in tandem with deep cuts to emissions, and highlights the scaling that needs to happen to realize this goal. 

  • CDR can counterbalance hard-to-abate sectors: The report finds that CDR has an important role to play in reaching net-zero emissions by counterbalancing residual emissions in sectors of the economy like food production, long-haul aviation, and steel production (C.11.4). CDR is required both globally and nationally (Technical Summary, page 94).
  • Carbon removal cannot be an excuse to overshoot 1.5: The Working Group II report found that scenarios that significantly overshoot 1.5°C, including ones where large-scale CDR is used, bring catastrophic costs and other risks. The Working Group III report acknowledges the current limitations of CDR as well as the risks and impacts (C.11.2; C.11.5), stating that upscaling the deployment of CDR at very large scales depends on developing approaches to address feasibility and sustainability (C.11).
  • Responsible deployment is key: The report warns that poorly done CDR can have varying socio-economic side effects, depending on the method, site-specific content, implementation, and scale of CDR deployment (C.11.2). As a result, it is crucial to responsibly scale-up CDR. 
  • Multiple CDR solutions can work in tandem with one another: The report does not make a recommendation on which CDR approach is best. The estimates of carbon removal available from each CDR approach vary in the report. In addition, all approaches have limits and trade-offs. The report finds that CDR in the land sector alone presents challenges for competing demands on food security, conflicts with livelihoods, and the nuances of land ownership and management systems (C.9). The report finds that regarding mitigation generally, a broad portfolio is best and that portfolios of technological solutions reduce feasibility risks (Technical Summary, page 138) In this light, investing in multiple CDR approaches may be required to reach the gigaton scale of removal needed. This portfolio of options includes technological approaches like Direct Air Capture, which requires significantly less land area than nature-based solutions.   
  • Carbon removal is distinct from carbon capture: The IPCC places CDR and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) in two distinct sections of the report. The terms often get conflated. CDR and CCS are two diverse approaches to climate mitigation that use similar and overlapping vocabulary but undertake very different activities, often with radically different approaches. Carbon removal can address legacy emissions, which makes it a unique tool for meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. Conversely, CCS stops carbon dioxide before it gets into the atmosphere. 
  • Scaling up CDR is crucial: The report finds that scaling up CDR responsibly requires accelerated research and development, improved tools for risk assessment and management, targeted incentives, the development of agreed methods for measurement, and robust reporting and verification of carbon flows (C.11.5). Modeling in the report does not fully account for the falling costs of CDR, but general economic cost forecasts by prior IPCC reports failed to fully capture cost reductions that subsequently occurred for solar and wind power (Technical Summary, page 25). The report finds that modular small-scale technologies tend to improve faster and be adopted more quickly – a technological profile that may match DAC units (Technical Summary, page 25). 

It is critical to responsibly scale up carbon removal to removal in order to balance the carbon budget and limit warming at 1.5°C.

  • The world is close to exceeding its carbon budget: A significant but very small carbon budget remains to limit warming to 1.5° and the path to limit warming to 1.5° is extremely narrow. Pollution from hard-to-decarbonize sectors must be counterbalanced.
  • Carbon removal is needed to help close the gap: Carbon removal, which can counterbalance emissions in hard-to-abate sectors, with nature-based and technological solutions, can help ensure the world does not exceed its carbon budget if (and only if) it is paired with aggressive pollution reduction.  
  • We need to embrace all climate solutions: As the world gets close to exceeding our carbon budget, there is no silver bullet to solve the climate crisis. We need to double down on urgently reducing new climate pollution. This can happen in tandem with carbon removal and other climate technologies. Investing in carbon removal today can help answer questions on responsible carbon removal deployment, such as how to reduce costs and ensure that projects are developed with community input.

 

ICRLP Webinar Series: “The Global South in the Imagining of Climate Futures: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson and ICRLP’s Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò”

Authored by Isabella Corpora, Research Fellow, Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy

Prepared for the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy.

Accounts of climate futures typically advance a Northern perspective. Individuals and communities in the Global South are too often portrayed solely as victims of a changing climate, rather than as active participants in the crafting of climate responses. In his new book, The Ministry for the Future, speculative fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson presents a picture of what the near future could look like, with the Global South on the frontlines not just of climate impacts but of climate action. A world is depicted in which an international subsidiary body, created out of the Paris Agreement, attempts to ride and direct this climate rollercoaster. The novel reviews potential impacts of climate change and how strife, economics, and human ingenuity and perseverance go hand in hand. Along with global governance, Robinson evaluates, among many other things, carbon drawdown techniques and the creation of a “carbon currency” as methods to make change. 

On March 23rd, 2021 Robinson joined ICRLP in a recent webinar to discuss his book alongside Olufemi Taiwo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Research Fellow with ICRLP, and Kate O’Neill, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley as the session’s moderator. Taiwo looks at issues of environmental justice using the tools and perspectives of political philosophy with a specific carbon removal twist. The discussion over the course of the webinar ranged from climate governance to shifting economic systems and why environmental justice considerations must be held paramount. 

Common but differentiated responsibilities

The Ministry for the Future opens in a near-future India in the midst of a climate change-induced catastrophe. The event and its aftermath drive, in the novel, a set of actions building from and strengthening the Paris Agreement.

During the webinar, Robinson and Taiwo considered the prospects of the Paris Agreement as a global pact to address a warming planet. The idea of “common but differentiated responsibilities” has come out of the international climate response regime as a recognition that developed countries have polluted the most throughout history, therefore should bear more of the responsibility for addressing climate change, such as with increased funding. Taiwo’s work evaluates this from a political philosophy stance, reviewing what he described as “distributive mechanisms and issues of justice”. He suggested that it’s not just present-day carbon pollution that is at the heart of differentiated responsibilities and impacts. Both colonization and the Industrial Revolution have had inequitable effects on developing countries, physically from emissions but also societally. These today have transpired as divisions between the Global “North” and “South”.

With this comes recognition of “climate colonialism”, an acknowledgment that developed countries continue to pollute at the expense of developing countries. Moral dilemmas and difficult tradeoffs arise in the efforts to avert climate disasters, made particularly acute in Robinson’s novel when carbon removal and solar radiation management methods come into play. A theme in the conversation between Robinson and Taiwo was, who is to say what types of technology can or cannot be implemented by Global South populations when attempting to combat an issue they didn’t create? In Robinson’s book, this complex set of social and political choices is represented by India’s unilateral use of SRM technology. In real life this is, among other things, exemplified by the Green Climate Fund, which has had a $200 billion target to allocate for green development goals yet is currently operating around $10 billion. Though western countries are attempting to remedy their climate mistakes, they aren’t as forceful or consistent with their promises, and it is the South that will bear the brunt of these shortcomings. 

Governance

Moderator O’Neill asked the speakers what kinds of geopolitical changes are needed to make a fairer system. 

The speakers reviewed how updated policy and global governance could help address these issues, and discussed ways policy can be shaped from a scientifically backed rather than politicizing perspective. When it comes to carbon removal, the speakers suggested that the discussion should be regarding just usage of the technology. As Taiwo pointed out, even governance structures can be looked at as technologies. The conversation pivoted to forms of governance that emphasize local participation, with the discussion of “community control” through a “citizens assembly” where experts describe issues to the people and they can make an informed decision on how to address the problem, mitigating decisions made solely by a select few corporations and their executives and shareholders. Taiwo also described privatization as a governance structure, pointing out that a social budgetary decision-making system could instead be formed with “participatory budgeting” where the public decides more directly what programs funding goes towards. 

Robinson offered a related but different view on the question of markets acting as governance. Recognition was made that the problem of climate change is already quickly unfolding before us, therefore market mechanisms, or a shift back towards Keynesian economics and emphasis on financial institutions, could do the job faster than a reconfiguring of the capitalist order. A “pairing” of issues could help with this, such as development with regenerative agriculture that could simultaneously have carbon removal aspects such as biochar or soil carbon sequestration. 

This brought about a larger discussion between Robinson and Taiwo: how does one make a radical shift of economics in their current economy, and who chooses? Much of the North, currently operating from capitalist or hybrid systems, is continuing to abuse the environment through engrained market mechanisms. Not is but what radical change is needed to save us from this mass extinction event? How does one come about implementing a new economic system in one that, normatively speaking, is already functioning? How desperate does the system need to become in order for change to be made? At this point in the webinar, Robinson postulated whether westernization and modernization are all simply “capitalism”, and if modernization can occur without capitalism. Taiwo believes it can. 

The future, semi-based on the response to COVID

These are big questions. Yet, Taiwo reminded us that humanity has already experienced any number of civilization-shaping social shifts. Colonialism affected lives and physical environments around the world. Oil companies have already reorganized the coastline of Louisiana to build refineries. Adverse impacts for a portion of humanity are nothing new. A similar point, noted the speakers, can be made about technological interventions in Earth systems. Humans have already engineered the climate through carbon emissions; carbon removal options might be thought of as a way of engineering out of what has actually been done for almost the past two hundred years. Taiwo and Robinson described how we are “aestheticizing” the climate issue rather than using the tools we currently have to handle it: we evaluate issues of justice that can arise, but with inaction, actually exacerbate those problems. Thus, a radical shift needs to be made, and it needs to be made in the next ten years.  

When asked about the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and how the quarantine has affected emissions, both Robinson and Taiwo seemed on the same page. Vaccine distribution globally has been fairly inequitable, and the consequences for the rest of the world will backfire on the United States. This is similar to the climate crisis response, and where western countries occupy positions of power in global markets and political systems, their less egalitarian response will adversely affect them. Until social battles are met and reckoned with, we won’t be able to address the issue from the right framework. It’s going to take an assessment of the social systems and values of the North and the South to see the tools we have to generate change in a climate-altered world, and for consideration of the kinds of collective futures we want, or need, to build. 

Watch the entire webinar here.

Robinson and Táíwò responded in writing to participant questions that could not be answered during the event. To see questions and responses, click here.