Negative emission technologies: what role in meeting Paris Agreement targets?
A new report confirms that negative emission technologies (NETs) offer only “limited realistic potential” to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and not at the scale envisaged in some climate scenarios. In a new report by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC), senior scientists from across Europe have evaluated the potential contribution of negative emission technologies (NETs) to allow humanity to meet the Paris Agreement’s targets of avoiding dangerous climate change. They find that NETs have “limited realistic potential” to halt increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at the scale envisioned in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios. This new report finds that none of the NETs has the potential to deliver carbon removals at the gigaton (Gt) scale and at the rate of deployment envisaged by the IPCC, including reforestation, afforestation, carbon-friendly agriculture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCs), enhanced weathering, ocean fertilisation, or direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCs).