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Assessing global urban CO2 removal

Nature Cities (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Here, with the aim of supporting the path to achieving net-zero emissions in cities, we assess the existing literature on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the urban scale, seeking to quantify the potential negative emissions contribution of cities globally. Urban CDR options considered here include the storage of carbon in urban vegetation, soils and buildings, and the capture of CO2 from indoor environments via decentralized direct air capture. Our estimates of carbon storage and capture potentials indicate that deploying CDR options at the urban scale could make a substantial contribution to global mitigation of climate change, alongside supporting the upscaling of climate action from local to regional and national scale. The associated human and environmental well-being effects strengthen the case for cities as carbon sinks. Any upscale of the reviewed technologies is nevertheless constrained by several uncertainties, economic barriers and governance issues that pose substantial challenges to their implementation. From these, we identify key research gaps and recommendations for future research centered around the need for additional field deployments, consideration of the particularities of different urban geographies and socioeconomic contexts, and the establishment of robust cross-sectoral carbon accounting methodologies.

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Fig. 1: Typologies of urban carbon removal options (distinguished by source and final destination of the CO2) and surface albedo increase.
Fig. 2: Global urban carbon storage and capture potentials by 2050 with principal identified co-benefits and barriers to implementation.
Fig. 3: Summary of global urban carbon storage and capture potentials by 2050 (as ranges in the ‘Storage potential’ column), as well as identified co-benefits of the four urban carbon storage options.
Fig. 4: Identified implementation barriers for the four urban carbon storage and capture options.

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Data availability

The literature data that support the findings of this study are available on Zenodo71 at https://zenodo.org/records/10025263.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for discussions and suggestions to our approach to E. Azzi, S. Nehr, H. Lerchenmüller, R. Dittmeyer, D. Heß and C. Kammann. We thank colleagues at MCC and GENIE consortium for their valuable discussions during the development of the paper. We are very grateful to the three reviewers for their inspiring and in some cases very detailed suggestions for improvement for the submitted manuscript. Q.R.M., S.F., S.L. and F.C acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the European Research Council (ERC) grant agreement no. 951542-GENIE-ERC-2020-SyG, ‘GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe’ (GENIE).

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Quirina Rodriguez Mendez, Sabine Fuss, Sarah Lück & Felix Creutzig

  2. Geography Department, Humboldt-University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Quirina Rodriguez Mendez & Sabine Fuss

  3. Sustainability Economics of Human Settlements, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Felix Creutzig

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Contributions

Q.R.M., S.F., S.L. and F.C. participated in discussions that led to the conceptualization and design of this study. Q.R.M. contributed to the data curation, methodology, investigation, visualization (production of figures) and writing (original draft preparation and editing). S.L. contributed to the data curation, methodology, validation and reviewing of the final manuscript. S.F. and F.C. contributed to the supervision, validation, editing and reviewing of the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Quirina Rodriguez Mendez.

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Nature Cities thanks Jan Corfee-Morlot, Kenneth Möllersten 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 Factors affecting urban albedo.

The albedo of urban areas is dependent on the reflectivity of surface materials comprising urban infrastructures (left panel), and on the three-dimensional urban morphology, responsible for the solar radiation trapping and the fractions of sunlit and shadowed surfaces (centre panel), as well as on latitude, climate zone, time and sky-view factors (right panel). Refer to Supplementary Table 12 in the Supplementary Information for further details on cool surface options. (Source: authors).

Extended Data Fig. 2 Envisioned system for CO2 capture from indoor environments.

Occupancy in buildings often results in higher indoor CO2 concentrations relative to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Direct air capture (DAC) modules installed in a building’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems take indoor air (red arrow) and output highly-concentrated CO2 as a product gas (beige arrow) while recirculating the purified air back into the building (grey arrow) (Source: authors).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Overview of data collection and review process methodology.

Colours refer to different stages of the assessment.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–3, Sections 1–7 and Tables 1–16.

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Rodriguez Mendez, Q., Fuss, S., Lück, S. et al. Assessing global urban CO2 removal. Nat Cities (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00069-x

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