Potential implications of carbon dioxide removal for the sustainable development goals

Abstract

As the international community's best expression of a collective vision of a desirable future, the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a framework against which to assess the broader impact of emerging technologies. Implications of technologies and practices for removing CO 2 from the atmosphere (CDR) are not fully understood and have not yet been mapped against the full range of SDGs. CDR is widely seen as necessary to achieve the Paris Agreement's global goal of limiting warming to 1.5-2°C, yet local geographical, socioeconomic , and political interdependencies are often overlooked. This review synthesizes the best available understandings of potential implications of CDR options aiming to complement emissions reductions. It seeks to identify effects on and interactions between specific social, environmental, and policy environments, in which various CDR options could be pursued. Climate change mitigation and co-benefits from CDR could significantly benefit SDGs, yet poorly designed CDR policies could also challenge SDGs. Specific CDR options could generate conflicts over land, water, biomass, or electric power resources, and exclude communities from policy benefits with negative cascading effects for a range of SDGs. In the literature, implications of CDR activities on sustainable development are derived from current pilot activities, inferred from similar practices already operational or model outputs regarding land, energy, or material requirements. Important gaps remain. We identify questions for further disciplinary and inter-or transdisciplinary work strengthening understanding of how CDR could either support or threaten the achievement of the SDGs. Key policy insights. CO 2 removal (CDR) appears essential for limiting warming to well below 2°C; such stabilization of global climate is a precondition for at least partially achieving the SDGs.. CDR options can generate positive and negative local/regional impacts on various SDGs via physical, social, economic, and political channels. None of these options are universally 'good' or 'bad'.. The scale of implementation of CDR and related impacts are highly dependent on policy design and national planning processes.. More research is needed to clarify how policy design can allow CDR options to generate synergies between, and prevent harm across, multiple SDGs.

Cancel (Out) Emissions? The Envisaged Role of Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies in Long-Term National Climate Strategies

“…While CDR has the potential to cancel out future emissions, currently much CDR faces a number of uncertainties related to technological developments, economic considerations and public acceptance, meaning they are not a particularly attractive policy choice (Smith et al, 2015;Williamson, 2016;Bui et al, 2018;Fridahl and Lehtveer, 2018;Gough et al, 2018;Bellamy and Geden, 2019;Fridahl et al, 2020b). The moral hazard debate highlights the potential tradeoffs and the positive synergies between CDR and emission reductions, different CDR methods (Levihn et al, 2019;Fridahl et al, 2020b) and between CDR and the sustainable development goals, SDGs (IPCC, 2018(IPCC, , 2019Honegger et al, 2020). Understanding the nature and likelihood of such tradeoffs or synergies is important when examining the conditions for CDR deployment.…”

Carbon Dioxide Removal Policy in the Making: Assessing Developments in 9 OECD Cases

“…Other important strands of the debate touch on the patterns of emerging societal debates and their possible polarization (Colvin et al, 2020) as well as the public perception (Cox et al, 2020), socio-political prioritization (Fridahl, 2017;Rodriguez et al, 2020), innovation dynamics (Nemet et al, 2018), incentive structures for research and deployment (Lomax et al, 2015;Cox and Edwards, 2019;Fajardy et al, 2019;Torvanger, 2019;Fridahl et al, 2020;Bellamy et al, 2021) and framings of different CDR methods (Bellamy and Osaka, 2020;Waller et al, 2020;Woroniecki et al, 2020). Furthermore, the literature highlights the role of CDR in integrated assessment modeling and possible implications for climate policy (Geden, 2016b;Beck and Mahony, 2018;Haikola et al, 2019;Workman et al, 2020), negative implications of deploying large-scale CDR for sustainability and biodiversity (Buck, 2016;Smith et al, 2019;Dooley et al, 2020;Honegger et al, 2020), and justice and equity considerations (Anderson and Peters, 2016;Peters and Geden, 2017;Shue, 2018;Fyson et al, 2020;Morrow et al, 2020;Pozo et al, 2020).…”

Who Is Paying for Carbon Dioxide Removal? Designing Policy Instruments for Mobilizing Negative Emissions Technologies

“…Initially met by climate change scholars with skepticism, such CDR is increasingly viewed as essential for meeting net-zero emissions targets at national and regional as well as the global level. The readiness of, and support for CDR approaches varies widely from already implemented and low-regret (e.g., restoring mangrove vegetation) to low or unknown (in particular open-ocean-based) approaches [see Honegger et al (2020) for an assessment of the impacts of various CDR approaches on the Sustainable Development Goals, Gattuso et al (2021)]. At least three rationales are frequently put forward for considering CDR in public policy (Geden and Schenuit, 2020;Morrow et al, 2020): (a) balancing out residual emissions from effectively-impossible-to-decarbonize sectors (like agriculture) for achieving a permanent steady state of net-zero emissions, (b) temporarily balancing out residual emissions from hard-to-decarbonize sectors (like construction, heavy industry, and heavy transport), while solutions for these sectors are being developed and just transformations with jobtransitions are taking place (Buck et al, 2020), and/or (c) to return to historical CO 2 concentrations through a phase of global net-negative emissions after achievement of complete decarbonization.…”

“…6. Prevent adverse side-effects to sustainable development goals and maximize positive co-benefits (Honegger et al, 2020).…”

“…Given the potential for significant side-effects -both harmful and positive -largely depending on CDR policy design (Honegger et al, 2020) and scale (Cox et al, 2018) as well as the importance of climate change mitigation for achieving long-term sustainable development (Nerini et al, 2019), it is essential that both domestic policy instruments and international (market and non-market) cooperation efforts are based on sound understandings of potential negative side-effects and positive co-benefits arising from every specific intervention. While the rulebook for Article 6 itself may require host countries to assess such effects on their sustainable development priorities, this minimal requirement may not be sufficiently stringent.…”