According to a new study led by Professor Gregory Nemet of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW–Madison, the rate of development for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies that could be critical tools to combat climate change is in line with similar technologies over the last century but outpaced by policy targets and industry projections.
Another new study led by Nemet finds that novel CDR methods need to scale at a much faster rate to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal of limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, which would require removing hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the course of the century.
In their paper published Oct. 30 in Communications, Earth & Environment, Nemet and his research team debut the Historical Adoption of TeCHnology (HATCH) dataset — an innovative project that tracks and analyzes a variety of agricultural, industrial, and consumer technologies adopted over the past century that can provide insight into the scale-up of new technologies such as carbon removal.
While the paper found evidence that the required scale-up of carbon removal technologies fits within the historical range of previous efforts, company announcements and government targets implied much faster growth than the historical record and IPCC CDR scenarios.
In their paper published Nov. 15 in Joule, Nemet and his research team find that 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal per year is taking place currently, with nearly all of it from forestry and only 0.1% from novel CDR.
The study finds that virtually all scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius require novel CDR. On average, scenarios increase novel CDR by a factor of 1,300 by mid-century.
The results of these studies will be included in the forthcoming 2023 UN Emissions Gap Report, which includes a chapter on carbon removal with contributions by Minx and Nemet.
