The politics and governance of negative emissions technologies

The starting point of this paper is the Paris Agreement under the UNFCCC agreed in 2015 and its global temperature goal.It highlights that the current pathway of decarbonization would result in a sharp temperature increase by 2100 (see Sect. 1) that would result in unacceptable risks of climate change (see Sect. 2).Those risks cannot be properly addressed by adaptation activities as long as there are no reliable expectations of the climate changes expected over the lifetime of current projects.The paper informs about such recently published projections that suggest that global surface temperatures will increase by approximately 5 °C (9 °F) over pre-industrial temperatures by the year 2100 and discusses options to bridge the gap to the goals specified in the Paris Agreement.In this context also two main geoengineering options carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiative management (SRM) and their associated risks are considered.At the center of the paper two proposals are made on a limited use of geoengineering that should finally help meet the goals of the Paris Agreement without increasing risks of geoengineering unduly, provided that decarbonization is significantly accelerated beyond the plans included in current National Determined Contributions.One conclusion is that geo-engineering can only provide a small contribution to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and that the main contribution needs to come from enhanced mitigation action.The paper also highlights how recommendations of the Financial Stability Board could contribute to result in the necessary shift of investments to accelerate GHG emission reduction and informs about a recent initiative to establish the necessary governance framework to manage geoengineering

CO2 emissions from biomass combustion Accounting of CO2 emissions from biomass under the UNFCCC

Many Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are envisaging the use of significant amounts of biomass as a primary source in their energy supply. The present greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventory guidelines, based on methods and approaches originally proposed by the IPCC in the 1990s do not add the CO2 emissions from the combustion or incineration of these biogenic fuels to national total emissions, as it is assumed these emissions reverse recent CO2 removals from the atmosphere during photosynthetic growth of the biomass, largely within the Party’s own boundaries. In a national annual inventory under the UNFCCC, the biomass carbon harvested in a specific year is balanced against the biomass carbon oxidation processes addressed in the energy and waste sectors of GHG inventories. The CO2 emissions from biomass oxidation in the present Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) inventory approach are accounted for by the country harvesting the biomass via the subtraction of the harvested biomass from C pools on their lands. This harvested biomass carbon is implicitly assumed to be oxidized both in the year and the country of harvest, regardless of whether this is factual. In the case of biomass exports, the CO2 emissions from the combustion/oxidation of this harvested biomass are not included in the national totals of the country where the biomass is used, as under the present approach this would lead to double counting on the global scale. With the increasing use of biomass on industrial scales, the assumptions underlying this approach start to introduce material inaccuracies on a national scale (versus global). Biomass combustion may no longer be negligible compared with fossil fuel combustion as biogenic fuels are increasingly traded internationally. In this paper, we review the present IPCC carbon mass flow approach and propose a change in the reporting and accounting methods that has the potential to address this national GHG emissions reporting issue