Negative emissions—Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis

By J. Minx, W. Lamb, M. Callaghan, Sabine Fuss, Jérôme Hilaire, Felix Creutzig, T. Amann, T. Beringer, Wagner de Oliveira Garcia, Jens Hartmann and 9 more. 2018

747 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the Paris Agreement’s ambition of limiting climate change to well below 2 °C, negative emission technologies (NETs) have moved into the limelight of discussions in climate science and policy. Despite several assessments, the current knowledge on NETs is still diffuse and incomplete, but also growing fast. Here, we synthesize a comprehensive body of NETs literature, using scientometric tools and performing an in-depth assessment of the quantitative and qualitative evidence therein. We clarify the role of NETs in climate change mitigation scenarios, their ethical implications, as well as the challenges involved in bringing the various NETs to the market and scaling them up in time. There are six major findings arising from our assessment: first, keeping warming below 1.5 °C requires the large-scale deployment of NETs, but this dependency can still be kept to a minimum for the 2 °C warming limit. Second, accounting for economic and biophysical limits, we identify relevant potentials for all NETs except ocean fertilization. Third, any single NET is unlikely to sustainably achieve the large NETs deployment observed in many 1.5 °C and 2 °C mitigation scenarios. Yet, portfolios of multiple NETs, each deployed at modest scales, could be invaluable for reaching the climate goals. Fourth, a substantial gap exists between the upscaling and rapid diffusion of NETs implied in scenarios and progress in actual innovation and deployment. If NETs are required at the scales currently discussed, the resulting urgency of implementation is currently neither reflected in science nor policy. Fifth, NETs face severe barriers to implementation and are only weakly incentivized so far. Finally, we identify distinct ethical discourses relevant for NETs, but highlight the need to root them firmly in the available evidence in order to render such discussions relevant in practice.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/078b37b6e4f9eb899941f7e52cd07de5e9e1e801

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. Duncan P McLaren
2. D. Tyfield
3. Felix Creutzig
4. H. Haberl
5. Nils Markusson
6. Alexandre Lacoste
7. M. Callaghan

In Global and Planetary Change

1. H. Haberl
2. B. Groom
3. Duncan P McLaren
4. J. Barrett
5. D. Ivanova
6. Yoshua Bengio
7. T. Sterner
8. Christian Azar

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

1. Daniel Hausknost
2. Felix Creutzig

Citations in the corpus

• Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs) (2018, background): “helped to sustain inadequate political agreement on mitigation in the past decade [2,12,14].”
• Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “Although there has been significant progress in negative emissions research [446–450], the actual CO2 removal industry is still in its infancy.”
• “Fixing” Climate Change by Mortgaging the Future: Negative Emissions, Spatiotemporal Fixes, and the Political Economy of Delay (2019, neutral): “In most scenarios, between 400 and 1000 Gt CO 2 needs to be removed over the course of the 21 st century (Minx et al. 2018), or about 20 – 50% of all greenhouse gases emitted over the past 200 years or so.”
• Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “expanding carbon) [18] and moral hazards because they tempt policy makers to delay mitigation action now [16].”
• A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…either through reforestation and other landbased ‘natural climate solutions’ (Griscom et al 2017) or negative emission technologies (Fuss et al 2018, Minx et al 2018, Nemet et al 2018, Rogelj et al 2019), are required after 2050 to bring the climate back from an overshoot over the climate-change…”
• Climate economics support for the UN climate targets (2020, methodology): “This is consistent with the literature on larger scale integrated assessment models 69 .”