Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 08 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/taking-stock-the-state-of-cdr-fireside-chat-with-oliver-gede

TL;DR

  • Geden: only 2 countries (Australia, UK) name novel/durable CDR in NDCs through 2035; ~1/3 of long-term strategies for 2050 mention it. Damning baseline.
  • State of CDR report puts CDR at ~16% of global mitigation effort — higher than the 5-10% often cited. Worth understanding why before quoting it.
  • “Hard to abate” is partly politically hard to abate — CDR risks becoming a flexibility valve for politicians dodging transport/buildings decarbonization. Sharp framing.
  • EU’s 5% international credits allowance: officially “no CDM mistakes round two,” but Geden expects criteria to be more lenient than current rhetoric suggests.
  • land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) accounting hides the ball: net targets mask gross emissions (e.g. Germany’s 50 Mt/yr from peatland drainage, stable, now 8% of national total).

Sebastian Manhart interviews Oliver Geden (SWP, IPCC WG3 Vice Chair, State of CDR co-author) live at NEP Summit Brussels, recorded the week the third State of CDR report dropped. Thirty minutes covering policy sequencing (foundational → supply → demand), the gap between net zero pledges and actual CDR planning, EU pillar architecture, and how the Iran conflict scrambles climate attention.

The most useful number for practitioners: 16% of global mitigation effort attributed to CDR in the report’s framing. Geden’s explanation matters — it’s higher than typical because most analyses fail to split LULUCF into gross emissions and gross removals. The EU’s -310 Mt LULUCF target by 2030 is actually ~150 Mt of land-sector emissions offset by ~460 Mt of removals. Once you decompose it honestly, residual emissions are larger, and the removal wedge required is correspondingly larger. The political reason nobody presents it this way: bigger removal numbers “sound less ambitious.” For anyone building demand-side cases or sizing markets, this reframing is load-bearing.

The second sharp claim is on political economy. Geden argues the “hard to abate” category is expanding for political rather than technical reasons: “hard to abate can also be politically hard to abate.” Transport and buildings interfere with voters’ daily lives in ways power-sector decarbonization didn’t, so politicians have an incentive to designate more sectors as residual-emission territory and lean on CDR. Combined with factions wanting CDR-enabled ETS price control and the 5% international credits provision — which Geden expects to land more lenient than current “no-CDM-mistakes” rhetoric — durable CDR demand could materialize from places the sector isn’t currently courting. That’s both opportunity and reputational risk: if CDR becomes the flexibility valve that lets governments under-deliver on mitigation, the mitigation-deterrence critique writes itself.

For context on the underlying report, see the Negative Emissions Platform which hosted the event, and Geden’s home institution SWP. On the EU ETS integration question specifically, Eve Tamme and Sebastian have covered the Commission’s expected end-of-year package across earlier CDR Policy Scoop episodes — this one is the high-altitude companion piece. The Saudi modeling detail (60% residual emissions by 2060, balance via direct air capture with storage) is the kind of number worth filing away when sizing non-OECD demand scenarios.

Useful for: policy leads at durable CDR companies sizing EU and non-OECD demand, buyer-side analysts trying to understand where the 5% international credits debate lands, and anyone who needs to defend or attack the “16% of mitigation” framing in board decks.