– Quantifying the amount of land needed, which we have done in this article, highlights the sheer unfeasibility of countries’ current pledges to remove carbon dioxide. This will impact land currently used for other purposes, so conflicts arising from the need to ensure sufficient amounts of land for food and biodiversity, will be inevitable, says Wim Carton, senior lecturer at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies.
Achieving net-zero climate targets requires some level of carbon dioxide removal. Under the Paris Agreement, countries make climate pledges in the form of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years. While not legally binding, and maybe more accurately viewed as aspirational targets, they can be seen as indications of how countries intend to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Almost a billion land hectares globally
The research study, which is published in Nature Communications, highlights how the net-zero targets in these pledges combined would require almost a billion land hectares globally. For over 40% of this area, the pledges envisage the conversion of existing land uses to forests, while the remaining area restores existing ecosystems and land uses. In total the researchers reviewed 194 countries’ pledges and were able to quantify the land use mitigation commitments for 140 countries. Pledged activities included land and forest restoration, tree-planting or reforestation, and (for just a few countries) Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) or direct air capture and storage (DACS).
– While we might need to remove carbon dioxide in the future to maintain a healthy planet, we need to minimize the reliance on tree planting and bioenergy crops so as to avoid exacerbating existing problems with intensive and unsustainability land use.
– Foremost, countries need to articulate more realistic expectations about how to meet their climate targets. Existing scenarios are unlikely to work and if they do, would have disastrous consequences for the protection of livelihoods, food production, ecosystems and biodiversity. They are also taking focus away from sorely needed efforts to reduce emissions here and now.
The most emitting countries have the highest reliance on land
The results also show how some countries’ reliance on land for carbon removal really stand out. For example, a number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are currently committing more than one fifth of their territory to climate change mitigation. This is an alarming result, according to the researchers, as it may result in some of the most vulnerable people losing access to land and resources that are key to their survival. In addition, some of the countries that are currently the most dependent on fossil fuels are also the ones with the highest reliance on land to achieve their climate targets.
– The most emitting countries clearly expect they can continue business as usual. Instead of stepping up their work to cut emissions, they seem to foresee a future where they can just offset any emissions by large scale carbon removal.
– This is worrying since these are the nations that need to drastically implement mitigation efforts, centered around the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels while investing in rapid upscaling of renewable energy.
Download the article: Over-reliance on land for carbon dioxide removal in net-zero climate pledges. It is published in Nature Communications.
