Evaluating the near- and long-term role of carbon dioxide removal in meeting global climate objectives | Communications Earth & Environment

[Michael Hayes]

"These novel CDR options, which include bioenergy with CCS, direct air capture with CCS, and enhanced weathering, among others, are currently at a nascent stage of development, expensive, and not deployed at scale. These methods tend to be deployed across regions very differently than conventional CDR on land, but still result in large shares of CDR being deployed in currently developing regions. These relatively high contributions from developing regions raises questions around fairness given uneven distribution of responsibility for causing climate change. Addressing these challenges will require rapid scaling up of mitigation investments, and one solution that has been suggested to address this problem is to assess fair shares of mitigation investment in these pathways, which should also take into account principles underlying the Paris Agreement, including sustainable development and equity."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01527-z 

MH] All 'novel' CDR methods that can utilize the highseas would avoid putting pressure on developing nations to contribute to solutions for problems that they did not create. Moreover, even the smallest land locked nation state can utilize continental size areas of the highseas for C neutral food, feed, fertilizer, fuel etc production if given the technology to do so. Further, providing developing nations with highseas capable C negative technologies, thus opening up C credits to such nations, would provide further equity, as well as likely stimulate a rapid expansion of novel CDR capacities.

Novel CDR technologies are now rather numerous, far beyond the three examples used in this work, yet they are mostly being developed in non developing nations. The transfer of new highseas capable CDR technologies to developing nations would help fulfill the demand for equity. The quality of the new technology will help address the need for sustainability.