Chapter 12: Global Distribution of Negative Emissions

Meeting our climate goals will require large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options to compensate for both ongoing emissions and residual emissions from hard-to-abate sectors. Acknowledging that different regions are unequally endowed with natural capacities to deliver CDR, ensuring an equitable distribution of burdens and efforts, and promoting collaborative actions emerge as critical issues to guarantee fair contributions and effective actions to meet the CDR goals. This chapter departs from country-by-country CDR quotas based on equity principles and investigates the broader implications of adopting two different political approaches – isolationist vs. cooperative – for meeting such quotas. Cooperation is the preferred approach as it allows the most economically appealing biogeophysical resources to be exploited. However, incentivising such cooperation between actors and regions showing different interests will require designing new policy instruments and incentives to engage with the large-scale deployment of CDR options. Major barriers need to be overcome for governing CDR at global scales, such as the difficulty of simultaneously considering all the facets of the CDR problem, the necessity to integrate removal actions in frameworks for conventional mitigation, the need to deal with the transboundary aspects of international policies and the present inability to elucidate a coherent roadmap for CDR options deployment resulting from the lack of harmony in scientific contributions.