Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Naomi Vaughan has her name on two linked preprints hosted on CDRXIV that examine how the UK builds the evidence base for its carbon dioxide removal policy. One, Slow but Sure: Expert Perspectives on Carbon Dioxide Removal Policy in the United Kingdom (June 2025), is an expert-elicitation study she co-authored with Smith and Forster. The other, Insights lost at points of vulnerability in UK policy evidence gathering on Carbon Dioxide Removal (October 2025), co-authored with Hope, names specific procedural chokepoints where non-industry and non-engineered-removal perspectives fall out of UK consultations. Both are back in focus now that 160 academics and civil-society leaders are pressing ministers to impose a carbon takeback obligation on fossil fuel producers, per Carbon Herald.
Vaughan is not a newcomer to this fight. Her University of East Anglia profile lists more than a decade of CDR assessment work, including as an IPCC AR6 contributing author and as a co-investigator on the CO2RE Hub, the UK Research and Innovation programme that regulators lean on when scoping greenhouse gas removal policy. She sits in the small overlap between the scientific-assessment track and the policy-advisory track that feeds the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The work itself is procedural, not technical. The Smith, Vaughan and Forster paper opens with a plain statement of the problem. As Vaughan and co-authors put it (@cdrxiv.org), “Carbon dioxide removal methods are essential to meeting national net zero targets, yet governments have only recently engaged with the need for CDR.” The Hope and Vaughan companion paper frames the scope even wider (@cdrxiv.org): “The methods, quantity, and timing of carbon dioxide removal is impacted by, and has implications for, decarbonising energy, land use change, agriculture, the earth [system]…” Together the two papers argue that UK CDR policy is being scoped through a narrow expert base, and that the consultation process itself has identifiable stages where broader perspectives drop out.
Her lens is the one policy scholars use on rulemaking: who gets in the room, at what stage, under what question framing. That matters for any UK CDR rule that touches on obligation. A carbon takeback duty on fossil producers, if DESNZ pursues one, is a binding legal instrument. It would need to define eligible storage, verification standards, compliance timelines, and penalties. The Hope and Vaughan paper does not adjudicate what that rule should say. It maps where in the consultation pipeline the input needed to answer those questions gets thinned out. That is a useful map for anyone drafting a response, or for anyone who will later ask whether the rule rests on adequate evidence.
The bet Vaughan is making is that publishing this critique before a takeback obligation is drafted is more valuable than publishing it after. If the next UK greenhouse gas removal consultation broadens its respondent pool beyond engineered-removal developers and incumbent energy firms, her preprints will have done work. If it does not, she has at least put a peer-reviewable account of the narrowing into the public record. Given her role on CO2RE, the critique carries weight it would not carry from an outside voice.
Her voice matters to the broader CDR conversation for a reason that is easy to lose sight of. Most public debate about CDR is about pathways and prices: direct air capture cost curves, enhanced rock weathering measurement, ocean alkalinity enhancement field data. The Captain Drawdown primer What Is Enhanced Weathering? sits in that pathway-centric tradition. Vaughan is asking a different question. Before you argue which pathways to fund or mandate, ask who the government is listening to when it decides. In a UK context where the storage-mandate letter is now on ministers’ desks, that upstream question is the one that determines whether the resulting rules survive contact with the sectors they bind.
What to watch: whether DESNZ’s response to the 160-signatory letter cites either preprint, and whether the next UK greenhouse gas removal consultation publishes a respondent breakdown that is meaningfully wider than the last one. If neither happens, the gap Vaughan and her co-authors describe stays open, and any future takeback obligation will be argued over on exactly the terms her papers predict.
Citations
- Cdrxiv — Slow but Sure: Expert Perspectives on Carbon Dioxide Removal Policy in the United Kingdom
- Cdrxiv — Insights lost at points of vulnerability in UK policy evidence gathering on Carbon Dioxide Removal
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Co2Re — CO2RE Hub
Correction (2026-09-18): this log originally described the two Vaughan preprints as published “this week.” They date from June and October 2025; the current news is the 160-signatory letter. Dates corrected; the analysis stands.