Look up: Why is no one talking about carbon removal?

Achieving Net Zero is the mission of our generation — our lives and livelihoods depend on it. Wherever you go, businesses, governments, and communities are looking to the future — their eyes locked on 2030, 2040, 2050 — and trying to find the pathways to rapidly wean themselves off fossil fuels.

But here’s the problem. Despite all the valiant efforts to decarbonise, and some significant progress in some parts of the world and in certain industries, decarbonisation is not happening fast enough. The latest IPCC Report tells us that carbon removal is part of nearly every scenario to stay within 1.5 or even 2 degrees of warming. Let that sentence sink in.

In the run up to the launch of the walk it back campaign, we set out to find out what was going on around carbon removal. We spoke to the bigger environmental and development NGOs, we chatted to international institutions, we called up sustainable business networks and research consortiums.

What we discovered was surprising. Beyond a cluster of smart think tanks and academic organisations, most NGOs and large institutions are simply not talking about carbon removal. Yes, there is an avid focus on reforesting, rewilding and other nature based approaches for reducing carbon — but there is almost no conversation happening around hybrid and tech-based solutions (e.g. rock mineralisation, direct air capture, biochar production, soil amendment etc.). As one NGO said to us, ‘if carbon removal is being talked about, then it’s all behind closed doors’.

There is a host of reasons that people may not be talking about carbon removal — including data and evidence gaps, ideology, funding, expertise — and above all the fear that it is a very unwelcome distraction from the imperative of reducing emissions. But, in setting our eyes so firmly on reducing emissions, is everyone missing the 2 trillion tonnes of carbon lingering in the atmosphere? Shouldn’t we be looking up as well as forward?