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Equity in allocating carbon dioxide removal quotas

Abstract

The first nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement include no mention of the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) necessary to reach the Paris targets, leaving open the question of how and by whom CDR will be delivered. Drawing on existing equity frameworks, we allocate CDR quotas globally according to Responsibility, Capability and Equality principles. These quotas are then assessed in the European Union context by accounting for domestic national capacity of a portfolio of CDR options, including bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, reforestation and direct air capture. We find that quotas vary greatly across principles, from 33 to 325 GtCO2 allocated to the European Union, and, due to biophysical limits, only a handful of countries could meet their quotas acting individually. These results support strengthening cross-border cooperation while highlighting the need to urgently deploy CDR options to mitigate the risk of failing to meet the climate targets equitably.

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Fig. 1: Cumulative CDR quotas by 2100 for the UNFCCC countries according to equity principles.
Fig. 2: Comparison between the CO2 removal and storage potentials in each EU country and the quotas derived from the equity principles.
Fig. 3: Comparison between temporal CDR natural potentials with the quotas for all equity principles in Germany.

Data availability

All raw data supporting the findings of this study can be procured through the referenced literature. Data used for the figures are publicly available online at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3741428 or from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support from the Natural Environment Research Council for funding the GGROpt project (grant no. NE/P019900/1).

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C.P and A.G.-M. conceived the research and carried out the numerical calculations. C.P, A.G.-M., D.M.R., N.M.D. and G.G.-G. contributed to interpreting the results and writing the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to David M. Reiner, Niall Mac Dowell or Gonzalo Guillén-Gosálbez.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Heleen van Soest and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Estimation of temporal CDR potential.

Subplot (a) illustrates the procedure followed to estimate the annual removal natural potential in each country, which is translated into a certain amount of CO2 accumulated yearly in biomass resources as shown in subplot (b). Subplot (c) provides the cumulative removal natural potential resulting from adding up annual potentials over the time horizon. Each series (in green) corresponds to the situation where all annual resources are used from a certain year (that is, 2020, 2030, and 2090) onwards. The removal natural potential lost due to delaying actions is provided for each of these years with red arrows located at the right-hand side of the plot.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary methods, results, Figs. 1–4, Tables 1 and 2, and references.

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Pozo, C., Galán-Martín, Á., Reiner, D.M. et al. Equity in allocating carbon dioxide removal quotas. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 640–646 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0802-4

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