Negative emissions and the long history of carbon removal

Large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), is increasingly seen as a key component of climate change mitigation pathways that limit warming to 1.5C or 2C.  CDR approaches tend to be frames as novel and untested, and mostly focuses on hypothetical future scenarios. Yet CDR has a longer and, in many ways, more tangible history than this framing suggests – the lessons of which are largely overlooked in much of the current debate. 

In a new paper LUCSUS researcher Wim Caron and Jens Friis Lund (Copenhagen University), review the history of Large scale carbon dioxide removal and draw out some key lessons for scaling up implementation of CDR.