Scaling up carbon dioxide removals – Recommendations for navigating opportunities and risks in the EU

European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (2025). Scaling up carbon dioxide removals – Recommendations for navigating opportunities and risks in the EU. European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change , Copenhagen, Denmark. 10.2800/3253650.

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Abstract

The damages caused by climate change are already being felt globally and across Europe, and the risk of crossing tipping points is growing. As the fastest-warming continent, Europe faces increasingly severe climate impacts such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods. These events not only threaten Europeans’ health, water resources and ecosystems, but also food and energy security, infrastructure and financial stability. 2024 was the warmest year on record, with a global average temperature of 1.6°C above the pre-industrial level. This first exceedance of the 1.5°C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement underscores the urgency of taking action to stop global warming and keep long-term warming under 1.5°C, to reduce the likelihood of extreme weather events and avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
Concretely, global greenhouse gas emissions must be kept within a finite greenhouse gas budget, which represents the maximum cumulative emissions that can be released while still limiting temperature rise. Exceeding this budget would significantly increase the risk of severe and irreversible climate impacts. As the remaining budget is shrinking rapidly, global efforts must focus on drastically cutting greenhouse gases while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through capture and durable storage. Balancing emissions and removals to reach net zero – and eventually net-negative emissions, where removals exceed emissions – is essential to halting global warming and ultimately decreasing temperatures. Although net-negative emissions cannot reverse past climate impacts or undo the crossing of tipping points, they would restore atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to within safer limits and help to manage temperature overshoots.
To support global efforts in the fight against climate change, the EU is committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions domestically within the EU by 2050 at the latest, and pursuing net-negative greenhouse gas emissions thereafter. This requires deep emission reductions, as well as a rapid and sustainable scale-up of removals to counterbalance residual emissions from activities that currently have no or limited mitigation alternatives (for example, heavy industry, long-distance air and maritime transport, and agriculture). Emission reductions and carbon dioxide removals should be pursued in parallel, and one cannot substitute for the other: efforts to scale up removals should not deter the EU from accelerating investments to support drastic emission reductions.

Item Type:	Other
Uncontrolled Keywords:	European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change; European Climate Law; climate policy; climate neutrality; carbon dioxide removal (CDR); climate impacts
Research Programs:	Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) > Integrated Assessment and Climate Change (IACC) Energy, Climate, and Environment (ECE) > Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions (TISS)
Depositing User:	Michaela Rossini
Date Deposited:	21 Feb 2025 11:20
Last Modified:	21 Feb 2025 11:21
URI:	https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/20418

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