Taking stock of carbon dioxide removal policy in emerging economies: developments in Brazil, China, and India

Schenuit, F., Brutschin, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7040-3057, Geden, O., Guo, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6415-8083, Mohan, A., Oliveira Fiorini, A.C., Saluja, S., Schaeffer, R., & Riahi, K. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7193-3498 (2024). Taking stock of carbon dioxide removal policy in emerging economies: developments in Brazil, China, and India. Climate Policy 1-20. 10.1080/14693062.2024.2353148.

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Abstract

Deliberately removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is an important element of bringing mitigation pathways in line with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. To reach global net-zero CO2 emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot, global mitigation pathways assessed by IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report require some world regions to achieve net-negative CO2 emissions with large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) deployment. This raises important questions about the availability and feasibility of CDR deployment in different societal and political contexts.

This paper therefore combines an analysis of CDR deployment in a sample of scenarios from the IPCC AR6 database with a bottom-up analysis of the state of CDR governance and policy in countries considered key in scaling up CDR capacity and not yet covered by existing research. In particular, the paper focuses on Brazil, China, and India as important emerging economies and large emitters. We highlight the expected use of CDR methods in those regions in scenarios and systematically assess and compare the level of CDR regulation and innovation across these countries. This comparative perspective has the potential to broaden the understanding of existing and emerging CDR policies and politics.

The synthesis of the case studies provides three key contributions to existing literature: First, we explore the state of CDR governance and policymaking in key emerging economies. As in OECD countries, there is a notable lack of CDR regulation and innovation to enable the scale of CDR required in the short- and medium term. Second, we identify that repurposing policies is a key type of emerging CDR policymaking in these countries targeting CDR methods in the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector. We find that the repurposing efforts strengthen the level of regulation and innovation for this group of methods. Third, we explore three building blocks (regional differentiation, delay of upscaling, sustainability thresholds) of plausible CDR deployment narratives that could help bridge integrated assessment models and comparative case studies in future research.

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