The EU will not be able to meet its 2050 climate neutrality target without natural and industrial processes that withdraw vast volumes of carbon from the atmosphere, analysts told an event on Tuesday.
“Carbon removals will be needed at a very, very large scale in the future,” said Fabien Ramos, policy officer at the European Commission, at the event hosted by NGO Carbon Market Watch (CMW) in Brussels.
The event was organised by a coalition of at least 18 stakeholders including CMW, non-profit Climate Action Network Europe, environmental research institute Oeko Institut and think tank Sandbag.
The coalition proposed nature-based and industrial carbon removal options, such as planting trees and direct air capture, to improve the EC’s proposal to cut emissions by 90% below 1990 levels by 2040.
Methods that can store carbon dioxide, CO2, for “at least several centuries” should be considered permanent and can therefore be used to compensate for emissions that would be hard to abate, the coalition said.
However, support for carbon storage methods must not undermine efforts to slash emissions, they added.
One of the coalition’s key proposals was to set legally binding targets for permanent carbon removal in addition to gross emission reduction targets.
Carbon removal
Forests and wetlands provide a natural means of absorbing carbon from the atmosphere but their potential is limited.
Synthetic approaches, such as direct air capture technologies, were also likely to remain “expensive and uncompetitive”, limiting their potential too, said Ben Lee, senior emissions analyst at Energy Aspects.
“We don’t expect much use of removals in the EU ETS before the 2030s,” he said.
The EU was “well positioned” to take the lead in this field given changing political currents in the US, Felix Schenuit, research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the event. President-elect Donald Trump has been dismissive of climate change concerns.
“The EU is in a unique position to link [carbon removals] with carbon pricing and other climate policy instruments,” said Schenuit.
Still, new policies that support compliance (including the EU ETS) would be key, he added.
source: montel news
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