Specialty grand challenge: renaming our section to “Carbon Dioxide Removal”

Renforth, Phil; Bellamy, Rob; Beerling, David; Boettcher, Miranda; Bonalumi, Davide; Brandão, Miguel; Fridahl, Mathias; Fuss, Sabine; Hansson, Anders; Heyward, Clare; Kolosz, Ben; Lamers, Patrick; McLaren, Duncan; Pomi, Raffaella; Sanchez, Daniel L.; Shayegh, Soheil; Sick, Volker; Van der Spek, Mijndert; Vishal, Vikram; Wilcox, Jennifer

doi:10.3389/fclim.2023.1279109

SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE article

Front. Clim., 18 September 2023

Sec. Carbon Dioxide Removal

Volume 5 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2023.1279109

Specialty grand challenge: renaming our section to “Carbon Dioxide Removal”

$\r\nPhil Renforth$ Phil Renforth¹^*

Mathias Fridahl⁷

Sabine Fuss^8,9

Anders Hansson⁷

Clare Heyward¹⁰

Ben Kolosz¹¹

Patrick Lamers¹²

Duncan McLaren¹³

Raffaella Pomi¹⁴

Daniel L. Sanchez¹⁵

Soheil Shayegh¹⁶

Volker Sick¹⁷

Mijndert Van der Spek¹

Vikram Vishal¹⁸

Jennifer Wilcox¹⁹

¹Research Center for Carbon Solutions, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
²Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
³Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
⁴Research Cluster Climate Policy and Politics, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany
⁵Department of Energy, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
⁶Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
⁷Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Environmental Change, The Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research (CSPR), Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
⁸Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany
⁹Department of Geography, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
¹⁰Institute for Philosophy, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
¹¹Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom
¹²National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Strategic Energy Analysis Center, Golden, CO, United States
¹³The Emmett Institute, School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
¹⁴Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
¹⁵University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States
¹⁶RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Lecce, Italy
¹⁷Department of Mechanical Engineering, Global CO2 Initiative, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
¹⁸Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India
¹⁹Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States

While the concept of removing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to help prevent climate change has been around for decades, it is only relatively recently that its importance within climate policy has moved into mainstream discussions. As such, conventions for nomenclature are widely debated (for examples, see Table 1). The proposed methods of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere to restore a level that ensures a stable climate, are diverse and often share little in their form and function beyond their impact on atmospheric CO₂. However, for this reason alone, it is useful to refer to these within an umbrella term. In this editorial, we outline why the editorial board has decided to rename this section of Frontiers in Climate to “Carbon Dioxide Removal”.

TABLE 1

Table 1. The use of terminology to describe the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere from IPCC 1.5 degree report and the 6^th Assessment Report.

The original title for the section “Negative Emission Technologies” (NETs) was first used in a paper title by Lemoine et al. (2012), although “negative emissions” seems to have been used perfunctorily in the climate modeling community (e.g., Harvey, 2004) as a useful driver to a desired atmospheric CO₂ concentration, and the “technologies” for achieving this were implicit (Azar et al., 2006), and finally explicitly referred to as NETs (Azar et al., 2010) specifically for biomass energy carbon capture and storage. It similarly has been used within life-cycle analysis (LCA) to describe emissions reduction approaches that result in a net negative value on LCA emissions balance sheets (e.g., Brinck et al., 2011). McLaren (2012), responding to the use of “negative emissions” terminology by the UK Climate Change

Committee, was the first to connect negative emissions with the broader set of technologies that perform the function (although with a preference for “techniques”) and encompassing non-CO₂ greenhouse gasses. NETs has subsequently been used in high level reports by the Committee on Developing a Research Agenda for Carbon Dioxide Removal Reliable Sequestration (2019) and the European Academies' Science Advisory Council, EASAC (Courvoisier and European Academies Science Advisory Council, 2018), and it was within this context that the name was chosen for this section (Renforth and Wilcox, 2020).

“Carbon Dioxide Removal” (CDR) has been used extensively (e.g., an early example specifically referring to removal from the atmosphere is Spector and Dodge, 1946). CDR was also the preferred sub categorization within the emerging discussion on “Geoengineering” (Keith, 2000; The Royal Society Shepherd, 2009; NASEM, 2015). The term appears to be favored within the IPCC's 6th Assessment Report (AR6), referenced in both Chapter 3, 4, 7 and 12 of working group III to specifically refer to the approaches that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere (Babiker et al., 2022; Lecocq et al., 2022; Nabuurs, 2022; Riahi et al., 2022). “Negative emissions” is used by AR6 to refer to outcome of applying CDR at a systems level, rather than the removal approach. The “technologies” within NET is almost entirely omitted from use within AR6, and follows concerns about the drawing of arbitrary lines between “natural” and “technological” CDR (Bellamy and Osaka, 2020). Likewise, within international, European and US governance policy landscapes, the terms “carbon removal” and “CDR” are now consistently used (see for example negotiations around Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC Secretariat, 2015), the EU legislative process on the certification of carbon removals (European Commission, 2022), the proposed US Federal Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act (US Congress, 2022) and other policy spheres (Schenuit et al., 2021; Schenuit and Geden, 2023). Finally, the term has been the preferred choice in the influential Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer (Wilcox et al., 2021).

An initial reason for the choice of NETs for the section was that CDR can easily be confused with processes that remove CO₂ from other gases, especially carbon capture and storage (CCS) which was first suggested in 1977 (under the moniker “geoengineering” Marchetti, 1977), and developed throughout the 1990s and 2000s—therefore long before CDR came into policy debates. More recently, there have been advances in using the captured carbon (carbon capture and utilization CCU). The confusion between CCS and CDR is highly problematic given their similar names but different climate policy purposes (the former helping to reduce emissions, the latter compensating for residual emissions or contributing to net negative emission pathways). Careful consideration of locating CDR within the landscape of climate change responses is well established academically (Heyward, 2013), and the differentiation for policy has also been well articulated (Schenuit et al., 2023). While the risk of confusion remains, the possible impact is less than in 2018 and CDR has since become a well-established term.

The use of “Greenhouse Gas Removal” (GGR) followed early use of CDR in a categorization review by Boucher et al. (2014), and has been used almost exclusively in Europe, and especially in the UK (Royal Society, 2018). It was included in the glossary of the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2022), but omitted from the glossary of AR6 and considered only as a previously used term. Research considering the removal of other, short-lived, greenhouse gases (e.g., methane) from the atmosphere is still at a relatively early stage, with the direct comparison with CO₂ removal not being particularly helpful given that the removal of short-lived gases has a similar impact on climate as reducing their emissions. It is of equal relevance that CDR approaches do not only differ in the processes that captures the CO₂ from air or bodies of water, but also in the fate of the CO₂ and how long it remains removed from the environment.

Academic journals play a vital role in disseminating scientific knowledge and fostering scholarly communication. They serve as platforms for researchers to share their findings, exchange ideas, and catalyze scientific progress. CDR is a field of interdisciplinary research, and it is essential for our section in Frontiers in Climate to embrace the broadest appeal to accommodate the needs of the scientific community. Furthermore, the use of “Negative Emission Technologies” can impose an unnecessary restriction to the potential authorship and readership of the journal as non-technical aspects such as policy, legal, and social implications are not limited to individual technologies. On the contrary, “Carbon Dioxide Removal” has a greater potential of engaging audience from a broader field of Social Sciences and Humanities. We believe that renaming the section to Carbon Dioxide Removal uses the most widely used terminology for what the section publishes.

Author contributions

PR: Conceptualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. RB: Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing. DB: Writing—review and editing. MB: Writing—review and editing. DB: Writing—review and editing. MB: Writing—review and editing. MF: Writing—review and editing. SF: Writing—review and editing. AH: Writing—review and editing. CH: Writing—review and editing. BK: Writing—review and editing. PL: Writing—review and editing. DM: Writing—review and editing. RP: Writing—review and editing. DS: Writing—review and editing. SS: Writing—original draft. VS: Writing—review and editing. MV: Writing—review and editing. VV: Writing—review and editing. JW: Conceptualization, Writing—review and editing.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The authors declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

References

Azar, C., Lindgren, K., Obersteiner, M., Riahi, K., van Vuuren, D. P., den Elzen, K. M. G. J., et al. (2010). The feasibility of low CO2 concentration targets and the role of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Clim. Change 100, 195–202. doi: 10.1007/s10584-010-9832-7

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Azar, C. A., Lindgren, K., Larson, E., and Möllersten, K. (2006). Carbon capture and storage from fossil fuels and biomass—costs and potential role in stabilizing the atmosphere. Clim. Change 74, 47–79. doi: 10.1007/s10584-005-3484-7

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Babiker, M., Berndes, G., Blok, K., Cohen, B., Cowie, A., Geden, O., et al. (2022). Cross-Sectoral Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.