‘Humanity will not survive if we wait’, urge carbon removals experts at London Climate Action Week

CLIMATE experts have urged business and policy leaders to begin rapidly scaling carbon removal technology, warning “we will not survive as humanity” without action at a roundtable in London this week. 

At the private event as part of London Climate Action Week, senior figures across policy, academia, finance and business discussed the need to rapidly scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology while simultaneously phasing down fossil fuel use to avoid catastrophic global warming. 

A report published earlier this year by an international team of leading academics estimated that 6-13 Gt/y of CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.7^oC by 2100. Other researchers have estimated that around 1tr t of CO2 must be removed by the end of the century on top of existing decarbonisation pathways to limit global warming to below 2°C. 

One senior policy figure said that ambitious CDR and emissions reduction targets have not been accompanied by plans for rapid action, saying: “We will not survive as humanity if we wait until the end of the century to get to the target figure.”

He also said he was “not interested” in CDR technology that collectively captures anything less than 1bn t/y of CO2. Others disagreed, saying that existing commercial direct air capture plants with capacities of 500,000 t/y are a good starting point. From an investment perspective, “many of these novel technologies are so nascent we don’t know which ones are going to work out”, one person said, and it is important to avoid technological “lock-in” too soon. 

CDR technology refers to any process of extracting CO2 already present in the atmosphere, such as direct air capture, biochar production and biomass power generation with integrated post-combustion carbon capture. A senior analyst said that while CDR is “a key lever” to avoiding climate breakdown, it must accompany a “rapid phase out of fossil fuels”. Some estimates have found that CDR alone would only limit end-of-century global warming by a fraction of a degree. The analyst added that society must “minimise the CDR needs because it is going to be very hard to scale”. 

‘Targets not enough’

Broad calls for action on climate change also came after the UK government approved the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) seventh carbon budget which aims to reduce the country’s emissions by 87% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels. 

Steve Gummer, head of net zero at the law firm Sharpe Pritchards, said that while “targets matter”, they are “not enough without delivery”.

He added: “A target is not a delivery plan. The next phase has to be treated as a national infrastructure programme: faster consenting, bankable revenue models, clearer grid access, more storage and flexibility, and anticipatory investment in transmission and distribution.” 

Olivia Powis, CEO of the Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage Association (CCSA) echoed Gummer’s calls. 

She said: “If the government is serious about delivering clean growth, strengthening energy security and building globally competitive low-carbon industries, then CCUS and GGR [greenhouse gas removal] deployment must accelerate”.