Climate scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognised that if we did not decarbonise fast enough, then more CO2 would need to be removed from the atmosphere than what we currently let ecosystems do. This process has many names: “negative emissions” and “Carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) among them. As we barrel past the 1.5° target, the focus on CDR in the EU Climate discussions has grown.
In its most recent report, the IPCC is clear, the more we rely on removing carbon from the atmosphere, the more social and environmental risks it entails:
“If warming exceeds a specified level such as 1.5°C, it could gradually be reduced again by achieving and sustaining net negative global CO2 emissions. This would require additional deployment of carbon dioxide removal, compared to pathways without overshoot, leading to greater feasibility and sustainability concerns. Overshoot entails adverse impacts, some irreversible, and additional risks for human and natural systems, all growing with the magnitude and duration of overshoot.”
In terms of the lowest risk, one of the most effective, safest and cheapest ways is by restoring our land, protecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights and improving our food production. Europe’s degraded land needs significant restoration, so the opportunity to help the climate is staring us in the face.
However, using more “technical or permanent removals” has benefitted from increasing political attention in European climate debates, while the EU Nature Restoration Law barely survived the assault by conservative and extreme-right forces last year. But reality matters: promises, lobbying and public funding alone won’t remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Today, the dominant CDR technologies in EU climate policy and modelling are based on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), with CO2 resulting from the combustion of biomass (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, BECCS), or directly captured from the atmosphere (Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage, DACCS).
But decades of public support for CCS projects have shown that so far they have mostly been about promises, extremely expensive infrastructure, but have hardly achieved any meaningful storage. Even the most prominent, best resourced CCS projects in Europe were recently exposed as only storing a tiny fraction of the CO2 they claimed to. Fern’s recent investigation into the most prominent BECCS project in the EU, Stockholm Exergi, which has been promised billions in public and private support, is equally alarming: as recently as December 2024, they still had not identified a storage site for their project, nor had they made their final decision to invest.
A mere 0.8% reduction of the logging pressure in Sweden’s primary boreal forests, where deforestation rates are six times those in the Amazon, would sequester as much CO2 from the atmosphere, at a minuscule fraction of the cost, as Exergi’s BECCS project is planning to remove from forests.
As the EU ponders which climate targets to set for itself for 2040, the scientific advisory board on climate change established by the EU Climate Law, the ESABCC, has produced a report examining the current state of technical and natural CO2 sequestration in the EU, and formulating policy recommendations on ways to scale up CDR.
In a step away from current EU policy that prioritises Europe’s forests, wetlands and croplands as the dominant source of removing carbon, the new report focuses heavily on discussing, and in their recommendations outright promoting, CCS-based CDR technologies such as BECCS by recommending that they are included in the EU ETS. This is all the more surprising, given that the same report describes very well how the current EU legal framework for bioenergy cannot ensure a BECCS deployment that would not be at the expense of ecosystems and the land sink.1
In a context where Europe’s land sinks are plummeting, mostly because of overharvesting our forests and natural disturbances, it seems a terrible misstep for this report to recommend such massive incentives for BECCS and the role of carbon markets.
Providing policy-makers with scientific advice is a delicate exercise of negotiating the research question, gathering the relevant scientific facts, and making sure one’s recommendations can be heard by the recipient.
Commission President von der Leyen, to whom this report was given, has repeatedly expressed her appreciation for carbon pricing as a climate policy tool (“carbon must have its price”): as such, this report’s recommendations to boost carbon removals through carbon markets certainly fell on welcoming ears. But, again, reality matters.
Despite the report highlighting land restoration, particularly improving forest management and agricultural practices, as the lowest risk activity for removing CO2 emissions, the risk is real that this report’s recommendations hide these crucial facts. In a policy context where industrial farming and forestry interests are lobbying strongly against nature restoration policies, this could lead to policy decisions giving up on our lands and the sure bet solutions they offer, for an expensive and uncertain promise that starts with putting money in the hands of the biggest polluters.
1 “The decrease in the LULUCF sink is partly linked to increasing bioenergy use in the EU. Sustainable deployment of BECCS requires the EU to balance overall biomass demand with environmental limits by improving resource efficiency and biomass sustainability. Current policies, including REDII/III, do not sufficiently encourage an efficient biomass value chain, and face implementation challenges which undermine efforts to achieve sustainable bioenergy and BECCS deployment towards net zero.” (ESABCC)
Image: Christian Åslund/Greenpeace
Categories: News, Forest Watch, Bioenergy, Carbon removal, European forests