Carbon removal remains an essential piece of the climate puzzle, but it is no panacea. The world will need a combination of strategies to confront the climate crisis, including decarbonizing energy systems, protecting and restoring natural ecosystems, and developing new technologies to capture and store carbon.
The world is nearing the critical 1.5°C (2.7°F) global warming threshold, and hopes for carbon removal technologies as a silver bullet are fading. Even the most advanced efforts to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, scientists warn, will fall short of averting the devastating impacts of climate change if temperatures continue to rise.
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
Carbon Removal: A Partial Solution to a Global Crisis
For years, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has been touted as a critical tool in the fight against climate change. CDR includes a wide range of techniques designed to extract CO2 already present in the atmosphere, from planting trees and promoting ocean algae growth to advanced technologies that capture CO2 directly from the air. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has argued that scaling up CDR could help reduce temperatures and even reverse some of the damage, especially if the world overshoots the 1.5°C target set in the Paris Agreement.
But according to a new study published in Nature, even if CDR technologies are ramped up significantly, they won’t be enough to fully mitigate the catastrophic impacts of climate change. While removing carbon from the atmosphere may help slow warming, it cannot reverse other major disruptions already underway, such as rising sea levels, shifts in ocean currents, and ecosystem collapse.
“Even if you’ve brought temperatures back down again, the world we will be looking at will not be the same,” said Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a co-author of the study and scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. The findings underscore that once the planet crosses certain climate thresholds, some of the consequences may be irreversible, regardless of our efforts to cool the atmosphere.
The Problem with Overshooting 1.5°C
The IPCC’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C is not just a number—it’s a threshold that scientists believe represents the boundary between manageable climate impacts and uncontrollable catastrophe. An increase beyond 1.5°C could trigger a cascade of destructive changes, from more extreme weather events to the collapse of vital ecosystems like coral reefs.
Even the most optimistic emissions reduction scenarios predict that the world might exceed this limit, if only by a fraction. For example, the IPCC’s best-case models suggest that the planet could temporarily overshoot by 0.1°C or even 0.5°C before cooling back down through CDR efforts. But this overshoot carries significant risks. According to Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College London, one of the authors of the Nature paper, reversing an overshoot of 0.5°C would require removing more than a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere—an almost unthinkable task.
“The risks the world exposes itself to from an overshoot are much larger than acknowledged,” Rogelj said, stressing that relying on future carbon removal to fix today’s emissions could be a dangerous gamble.
The Limits of Carbon Removal
Although CDR holds promise, the capacity of these techniques is currently far from what’s needed to prevent dangerous warming. According to estimates, current carbon removal projects extract about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. To meet global climate goals, this figure must rise dramatically—to somewhere between 7 billion and 9 billion tons annually.
Scaling up CDR technologies presents significant challenges. Natural solutions like reforestation are limited by land availability, as large-scale tree planting could conflict with food production and biodiversity protection. Technological solutions, while promising, are expensive and energy-intensive, raising concerns about their feasibility for widespread use.
“If we are starting to use land exclusively for carbon management, this can strongly conflict with the other important roles of land, be it biodiversity or food production,” Rogelj explained during a recent briefing.
Moreover, the climate system itself complicates matters. As permafrost melts and peatlands shrink, vast amounts of methane—an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2—are released, further exacerbating global warming. These self-reinforcing feedback loops make it harder to pull the planet back from the brink, even with aggressive CDR strategies.
The Future of Carbon Removal: A Tool, Not a Solution
Carbon removal remains an essential piece of the climate puzzle, but it is no panacea. The world will need a combination of strategies to confront the climate crisis, including decarbonizing energy systems, protecting and restoring natural ecosystems, and developing new technologies to capture and store carbon.
Scientists, policymakers, and global leaders must resist the temptation to view CDR as a “get out of jail free” card. Instead, it should be seen as part of a broader strategy to stabilize the climate and protect future generations from the worst impacts of global warming.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. With each passing year of inaction, the world edges closer to the point of no return. And while carbon removal will undoubtedly be a critical tool, it cannot reverse the past—only by reducing emissions can we truly change the future.
