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The carbon dioxide removal gap

Nature Climate Change (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Rapid emissions reductions, including reductions in deforestation-based land emissions, are the dominant source of global climate mitigation potential in the coming decades. However, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will also have an important role to play. Despite this, it remains unclear whether current national proposals for CDR align with temperature targets. Here we show the ‘CDR gap’, that is, CDR efforts proposed by countries fall short of those in integrated assessment model scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 °C. However, the most ambitious proposals for CDR are close to levels in a low-energy demand scenario with the most-limited CDR scaling and aggressive near-term emissions reductions. Further, we observe that many countries propose to expand land-based removals, but none yet commit to substantively scaling novel methods such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage, biochar or direct air carbon capture and storage.

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Fig. 1: Combined versus separate assessments of the emissions and CDR gap.
Fig. 2: Current global CDR versus emissions.
Fig. 3: The three focus scenarios.
Fig. 4: The carbon dioxide removal gap.

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Data availability

The data for this Analysis are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10821849 (ref. 69). All raw and processed data are freely accessible, except for complete national-level CDR estimates in 2030 (that is, from the NDCs and other national documents) which will be made available upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code for this Analysis is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10821849 (ref. 69).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Union ERC-2020-SyG ‘GENIE’ (951542) grant (W.F.L., J.C.M., G.N., T.G., M.J.G., Y.P., J.S., K.R.); the UK Natural Environment Research Council ‘CO2RE Hub’ (NE/V013106/1) grant (S.M.S.); the European Union Horizon 2020 ‘ESM2025’ (101003536) and ‘RESCUE’ (101056939) grants (T.G.); the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research ‘CDRSynTra’ (01LS2101A) (J.C.M., O.G.) and ‘ASMASYS’ (01LS2101A) grants (O.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Berlin, Germany

    William F. Lamb & Jan C. Minx

  2. Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    William F. Lamb & Jan C. Minx

  3. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Thomas Gasser, Matthew J. Gidden, Yoga Pratama, Keywan Riahi & Jan Steinhauser

  4. Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy

    Rosa M. Roman-Cuesta & Giacomo Grassi

  5. School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Carter M. Powis & Stephen M. Smith

  6. German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Berlin, Germany

    Oliver Geden

  7. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, US

    Gregory Nemet

  8. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Naomi E. Vaughan & Harry B. Smith

  9. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Naomi E. Vaughan & Harry B. Smith

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Contributions

W.F.L., G.N., S.M.S., O.G., K.R. and J.C.M conceived the idea for the paper. W.F.L., T.G., R.M.R.-C., G.G., M.J.G., C.M.P., Y.P., J.S., N.E.V. and H.S. contributed to data gathering and the analysis. W.F.L. wrote the paper. All authors contributed to drafting, reviewing and editing the paper.

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Correspondence to William F. Lamb.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Andres Clarens, Wim Carton and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lamb, W.F., Gasser, T., Roman-Cuesta, R.M. et al. The carbon dioxide removal gap. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01984-6

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