Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Norway’s projected average net carbon uptake from its land sector to 2100 is now about 5 MtCO2 a year.
The 2019 projection for the same quantity was about 20 MtCO2 a year. Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) set the 2019 and 2026 projections side by side, and the expected sink shrank by three-quarters, roughly 15 Mt a year of removal that national carbon accounting could pencil in seven years ago and cannot now. His summary: “Successive projections of Norwegian Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) emissions lead to smaller net uptake… These are big changes, with big policy implications.” LULUCF is the inventory category for land use, land-use change and forestry.
These are projections, not measurements. A LULUCF projection takes forest inventory data (growth rates, age structure, recent harvest) and runs it forward to 2100 under assumptions about future harvest and growth. Peters is comparing projection vintages. Nobody surveyed Norway’s forests and found 15 Mt a year gone; the expected future changed. The comparison cannot distinguish a revision driven by new inventory data on real harvest or growth from one driven by changed assumptions or methods. Both are plausible, and the post does not say which.
The number matters because national net-zero plans treat LULUCF as a line item that offsets residual emissions. If a country with high-quality forest data and decades of inventory practice can see its expected sink fall by a factor of four in seven years, every plan that leans on a land-sink projection should state which vintage it uses and how much that figure has moved between rounds. The same question applies to the residual-emission estimates that CDR developers and buyers use to size future removal demand. Buyers assembling 2030 portfolios, like the CUR8 and Isometric offering I covered, are working from gap estimates that have a land-sink assumption buried inside them.
The contrast with project-level land carbon is sharp. In the same week, South Pole, Gaïago and Gold Standard issued the first European credits under Gold Standard’s Soil Organic Carbon Framework Methodology. Those tonnes pass measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) one project at a time. A national projection passes no such test; it is a scenario output. David Keith (@davidkeith.bsky.social on Bluesky), writing about how to name climate fields and not about land sinks, objected that one proposed label “lumps slow, durable carbon removal with fast-acting sunlight reflection, blurring distinctions that matter.” The analogy is mine, not his: a projected sink and a verified removal share the unit MtCO2 and almost nothing else as evidence. A University of Twente report on the ecological and social aspects of large-scale carbon removal, focused on the Netherlands, asks how to do removal responsibly; I read a shrinking land-sink projection as raising the stakes of that question, though the report itself makes no such link.
What the number does not tell us is why. Lower expected harvest, an ageing forest that fixes carbon more slowly, or a change in method would each explain part of a 15 Mt drop, and each carries a different lesson for other countries. A harvest or age-structure story means other forest nations with similar demographics are exposed. A methods story means earlier vintages were wrong in ways that may or may not repeat elsewhere. This is one country and two vintages. It establishes that the land-sink line can move a lot; it does not establish that it will move the same way everywhere.
Watch for the underlying Norwegian projection documents, or a follow-up from Peters, to break the drop down by driver. Until then, the practical move for anyone building a removal-demand estimate is to write the land-sink assumption down explicitly, with its vintage, and treat it as a scenario input rather than a measured quantity. The soil credits issued this week have a chain of evidence. The 5 Mt figure does not yet.
Citations
- Bluesky — @glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Goldstandard — Gold Standard’s Soil Organic Carbon Framework Methodology
- Bluesky — @davidkeith.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Utwente — ecological and social aspects of large-scale carbon removal