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Govern CO2 removal from the ground up

Nature Geoscience volume 12, pages 874–876 (2019)Cite this article

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Scientists and policymakers must acknowledge that carbon dioxide removal can be small in scale and still be relevant for climate policy, that it will primarily emerge ‘bottom up’, and that different methods have different governance needs.

Progress has been slow, not least because up to now there has been a reluctance among policymakers to openly state that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions alone will not suffice3. The reluctance is underpinned by popularly held anxieties about risks and dilemmas that might arise from undertaking deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system4. Such interventions are collectively referred to as ‘geoengineering’ and subsume CDR alongside methods for reflecting sunlight away from the Earth — solar radiation management (SRM).

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Rob Bellamy

  2. Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Rob Bellamy & Oliver Geden

  3. German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany

    Oliver Geden

Authors
  1. Rob Bellamy
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  2. Oliver Geden
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Correspondence to Rob Bellamy.

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Bellamy, R., Geden, O. Govern CO2 removal from the ground up. Nat. Geosci. 12, 874–876 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0475-7

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