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Humanity must suck carbon out of the atmosphere with new technologies even faster than the breakneck speed with which it has deployed solar panels if it is to limit global heating to 1.5C, a report has found.
Novel forms of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) must grow at “highly ambitious rates” to bridge the gap between what governments have pledged to clean up and what is needed to comply with the Paris climate agreement, according to researchers. They said the next five years were critical to establishing the technologies’ role in limiting climate damages.
Machines that suck carbon straight from the air and chemical techniques such as the production of biochar make up just 0.1% of the 2.2bn tonnes of CO2 that are removed globally each year, according to the report published on Tuesday. The rest comes from land-based actions such as planting trees, which are limited by space.
The report found novel forms of CDR have grown at a rate of 40% a year but start from such a small base that they would need to reach growth rates between that of solar panels and electric vehicles, which have grown faster than any other climate technologies. It found only one-fifth of the planned capacity in recent years has been delivered.
“Countries have pledged around 2.7bn tonnes of carbon removal by 2035 and about 3.6bn by 2050, but climate pathways require much more, especially in the long term,” said William Lamb, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the report. “This leaves a gap that grows significantly over time.”
CDR is a small but key component of roadmaps to stop the planet heating. It can offset the warming from hard-to-avoid emissions and bring temperatures back down to 1.5C after an “overshoot” period that scientists see as inevitable.
Scientists have compared carbon removal to cleaning up a rubbish-strewn beach: the cheapest solution is to not throw things away and to put any waste in bins, but litter-pickers can clean up pollution that washes up on the shore and remediate the damage done by decades of denial.
The independent scientific assessment, which is in its third edition, found several indicators showed “fragile” support. The US under Donald Trump, for instance, has left the Paris climate agreement and torn up green rules while promoting fossil fuels. The researchers said “policy dismantling and volatility” in the US was undermining credibility and placing pressure on other jurisdictions.
Microsoft, which the report identifies as the buyer of 82% of novel CDR credits, was reported in April to have paused its purchases. The researchers said the recent adjustments to the pace of its procurement showed that first-movers play important roles but “vulnerability emerges” if their actions do not diffuse more widely.
A spokesperson for Microsoft said its carbon removal programme had not ended but did not say when purchases would resume. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals,” said Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer. “Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach – not a change in ambition.”
Ana Hernández, from the Foundation for Climate Research in Spain, who was not involved in the study, said the examples contributed to a decline in corporate ambitions and increasing fragility of the support system. “To complete the picture, no G20 country has a legally binding removal target, and the NDCs [official climate action plans] submitted in 2025 did not increase ambition for carbon removal.”
Scientific pathways to stop the planet from heating foresee sharp, fast cuts to fossil fuel-burning and a reversal of the destruction of nature, alongside technologies to remove residual CO2 from the atmosphere. However, many forms of carbon removal do not even store it permanently.
Thomas Gasser, a scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and co-author of a study that last week found even impermanent methods could offset warming from short-lived climate pollutants, said extreme climate impacts were likely to keep getting worse even beyond this century without large-scale carbon removal.
“While we are indeed far behind in terms of CDR development, it remains the only option to revert climate change in the long run – although only if greenhouse gas emissions are also reduced to near-zero,” he said.
