Abstract
Concerns are increasingly raised over the centrality of carbon removal in climate policy, particularly in the guise of “net-zero” targets. Most significantly perhaps, treating emissions and removals as equivalent obscures emission reductions, resulting in “mitigation deterrence.” Yet the conflation of emission reductions and removals is only one among several implicit equivalences in carbon removal accounting. Here, we examine three other forms—carbon, geographical, and temporal equivalence—and discuss their implications for climate justice and the environmental risks with carbon removal. We conclude that “undoing” these equivalences would further a just response to the climate crisis and tentatively explore what such undoing might look like in practice.
Highlights
Carbon removal is steadily making its way into mainstream climate governance
While concerns over the equivalences that we examine have long been raised in the social science literature on e.g., carbon accounting and carbon markets (Lohmann, 2009; Carton et al, 2020), they are resurfacing under the guise of a rapidly evolving carbon removal agenda, and warrant being discussed and scrutinized as part of this new conversation
We argue that a just research and policy agenda on carbon removal needs to, first, distinguish between removals in the land use sector, and emissions from the use of fossil fuels in energy production, industry and transport
Summary
Carbon removal is steadily making its way into mainstream climate governance. As countries and corporations embrace net-zero emission goals, the ambition to remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere is becoming an implied if not always outspoken pillar of mitigation policies. Actions that minimize problems of impermanence through geological storage (such as BECCS) or create equivalences between terrestrial carbon stocks of different quality (such as between diverse forest ecosystems and monoculture plantations) need to be assessed for their impacts and risks related to both social impacts and biodiversity, ecosystems, and mitigation effectiveness Taken together, this means that research and policy agendas need to distinguish between emissions avoided or removed in the land sector; the difference in quality of carbon stocks between different land-uses and ecosystems; and mitigation action in sectors reliant on fossil fuels. This would guarantee that a majority of the mitigation burden is borne by those most responsible for the problem
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