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Investing in negative emissions

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 498–500 (2015)Cite this article

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Methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere add vital flexibility to efforts to tackle climate change. They must be brought into mainstream climate policy as soon as possible to open up the landscape for innovation and development, and to discover which approaches work at scale.

To achieve the widely held policy target of limiting average temperature change to 2 °C, integrated assessment models (IAM) increasingly depend on massive-scale 'negative emissions' through biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), deployed in the second half of this century1,2,3,4,5,6. Yet this key technology is technically immature today, and it is far from clear whether such large-scale deployment several decades in the future would be either feasible or desirable1. Hence a recent Commentary by Fuss et al. has branded BECCS a potentially “dangerous distraction”1. But before anyone dismisses what doesn't yet exist, we argue that the best way to determine “how safe it is to bet on negative emissions in the second half of this century”1 is to instigate a policy framework for greenhouse-gas removal (GGR) and invest in research and development innovation now.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagram showing the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of key science and technology components relevant to leading GGR approaches of afforestation, BECCS, biochar (from biomass pyrolysis) and direct air capture, according to the authors' assessment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Guy Lomax

  2. Earth System Science Group, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, North Park Road, Exeter, EX4 4QE, UK

    Timothy M. Lenton

  3. Virgin Earth Challenge, Virgin Management, 179 Harrow Road, London, W2 6NB, UK

    Adepeju Adeosun

  4. Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

    Mark Workman

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  1. Guy Lomax
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  2. Timothy M. Lenton
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  3. Adepeju Adeosun
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  4. Mark Workman
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Correspondence to Guy Lomax.

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Lomax, G., Lenton, T., Adeosun, A. et al. Investing in negative emissions. Nature Clim Change 5, 498–500 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2627

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