In comparison to its emissions reductions policy, the European Union’s (EU) policy for achieving carbon dioxide (CO2) removals is underdeveloped. Only in forestry and land use management does current EU law allow its Member States to use removals to comply with their climate policy commitments. This excludes the potential role that novel removals could play for effectively and efficiently addressing climate policy objectives. Novel removals with significant European potential include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, enhanced weathering, marine removal options like alkalinity enhancement, and direct air carbon capture and storage. Emissions reductions are crucial to mitigating climate change. However, in the past decade, the world community’s failure to reduce emissions at a sufficient speed to avoid dangerous climate change has become obvious.
This reality acutely necessitates the development of innovative sets of policies to spur the deployment of novel CO2 removals, an urgency that is further underlined by the long lead time for many novel removal methods. Disregarding the potential of novel removals is incommensurate with the scale of the challenge of achieving EU’s commitment to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. We argue that the current policy framework neither provides Union-wide economic incentives for novel CO2 removals, nor does it encourage EU Member States to develop national policy incentives. Our proposed solutions includes incentivizing removals through a conditional integration into the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), expanding the portfolio of removal methods in the Land-Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation, and to manage anticipations regarding which residual emissions that need to be counterbalanced by removals.
A-rapport,A2672.