NGO warns on carbon removals focus

Non-governmental organisation (NGO) Carbon Market Watch (CMW) has warned against the increased focus on carbon removals in climate policy, as the subject ramps up in the legislative agenda of both the EU and the UN, and is likely to be a key issue at Cop 28 in November 2023.

The European Commission last month published its proposal for a carbon removal certification framework to act as a future EU-wide voluntary framework to certify carbon dioxide removals (CDR).

CMW slammed the EU proposals for including non-permanent storage CDR and for omitting any clear view on what role carbon removals could "legitimately" play in EU climate policy, according to CMW policy expert Fabiola de Simone.

CMW executive director Sabine Frank warned against the high profile given to carbon removals at the recent Cop 27 conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, last month, where she said "UN-backed carbon removal pioneers" made "unrealistic" proposals for carbon removals focusing almost exclusively on non-permanent, land-based methods.

Cop 27, dubbed "Loss and Damage Cop", might well have been called "Removals Cop" given the levels of activity on the topic, advisors Paul Zakkour of consultancy Carbon Counts and Eve Tamme of climate policy advisory Climate Principles wrote in a recent assessment of the summit.

Carbon removals also indirectly figured in a draft version of one of Cop's cover decisions, which called for "developed countries to attain net-negative carbon emissions by 2030".

And the complicating aspects of removals — the risks pertaining to leakage, monitoring and reversals — contributed to the collapse of negotiations at Cop 27 on Article 6.4 of the Paris climate agreement, the future basis for a UN-regulated global carbon market and essentially a successor to the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism.

As work on Article 6.4 continues under the Article 6.4 supervisory board, with the final decisions expected to be taken at Cop 28, carbon removals will remain a constant issue.

The UN Global Stocktake process, which concludes next year, will further keep the spotlight on removals, Zakkour and Tamme say. Additionally, the UN work programme on urgently scaling up mitigation, which runs in parallel with the Global Stocktake programme, could provide an opportunity to open up a dialogue on the role of carbon removal in pre-2030 mitigation.

The focus on removals is likely to increase given the expectation of another round of updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris deal next year, and as the focus of NDCs and the stocktake itself move beyond 2030, Zakkour and Tamme say.

They argue that the UAE, as the incoming Cop 28 presidency, is bound to have a "deep interest" in carbon capture and storage and is likely to offer these technologies a stronger platform.

Research by Harry Smith of the University of East Anglia and others, published in scientific journal Communications Earth & Environment, finds that countries appear to be struggling to integrate CDR into the scenarios they have modelled in their long-term national climate strategies. Countries will largely look at using forests and soils to reach net zero, according to the study.

And countries face two major challenges, according to the study — "the limitations of forests to act as substantial or long-term stable carbon sinks, and the limited national geological storage capacity for engineered CDR".

In the case of limited domestic geological storage capacity, countries in their strategies should focus more on engineered CDR, or on the potential of international carbon credit trading under Article 6 of the Paris climate agreement, the authors suggest.

By Chloe Jardine