CO2 removal and 1.5{\deg}C: what, when, where, and how?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how international cooperation influences the deployment, cost, and fairness of carbon dioxide removal strategies like BECCS, AR, and DACCS to meet the 1.5°C climate goal, emphasizing the importance of policy instruments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that international cooperation significantly enhances cost-efficiency and fairness in deploying CDR pathways, especially favoring BECCS and AR, and highlights policy tools like negative emissions trading.

Findings

International cooperation reduces costs and increases feasibility of CDR deployment.

BECCS and AR are the most cost-effective CDR options with cooperation.

Limited cooperation makes deploying DACCS more challenging and costly.

Abstract

The international community aims to limit global warming to 1.5{\deg}C, but little progress has been made towards a global, cost-efficient, and fair climate mitigation plan to deploy carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the Paris Agreement's scale. Here, we investigate how different CDR options - AR, BECCS, and DACCS - might be deployed to meet the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives. We find that international cooperation in climate mitigation policy is key for deploying the most cost-efficient CDR pathway - comprised of BECCS, mainly (74%), and AR (26%) -, allowing to take the most advantage of regional bio-geophysical resources and socio-economic factors, and time variations, and therefore minimising costs. Importantly, with international cooperation, the spatio-temporal evolution of the CDR pathway differs greatly from the socio-economically fair regional allocation of the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives. With limited, or no international cooperation, we find that the likelihood of delivering these CDR objectives decreases, as deploying CDR pathways becomes significantly more challenging and costly - particularly when leading to the deployment of DACCS. Moreover, we show that developing international cooperation policy instruments - such as an international market for negative emissions trading - can deliver, simultaneously, cost-efficient and equitable CDR at the Paris Agreement's scale, by incentivising participating nations to meet their share of the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives, whilst making up for the uneven distribution of CDR potentials across the world. Crucially, we conclude that international cooperation is imperative, as soon as possible, to preserve the feasibility and sustainability of future CDR pathways, and ensure that future generations do not bear the burden, increasingly costlier, of climate mitigation inaction.