A new report has found that by 2025, the world must remove 1 Gigatonne, or 1 billion tonnes, of carbon from the atmosphere to keep global warming within the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C. However, projects in development will remove only a fraction of this.
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What is Happening?
- The report, written by the Coalition for Negative Emissions (CNE) and consultancy firm McKinsey, says that countries around the world will need to remove a billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2025 to meet the Paris target and more than one billion tonnes annually thereafter.
The report says, “Without action to deliver 1 Gigatonne (Gt) of negative emissions globally by 2025, keeping global warming within the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C cannot be achieved.”
- The current pipeline of projects in development could remove only around 150 million tonnes of carbon by 2025. These projects include negative emission projects, such as technologies to capture and store carbon emissions, technologies to directly capture and store emissions from the air, and natural climate solutions such as afforestation.
- However, currently, removal technology is expensive and while many countries around the world have initiatives in place to put a price on CO2 emissions, the prices are far too low to incentivise new projects.
- The report said that scaling up the technology would lead to lower costs, with a likely average cost of USD$41-138 per tonne of CO2 removed by 2050.
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Will Gardiner, CEO of coalition member Drax, which is seeking to develop an emissions negative power plant using biomass and carbon capture, said countries could help to pay for the technology by awarding tax credits for each tonne of CO2 removed.
- Meanwhile, this week, EU countries approved a law to reduce net EU emissions by 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Featured image by: Flickr
