Heatmap News just published The Sorry State of Carbon Removal.
Heatmap News covers the third State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, a collaboration among researchers at Wisconsin-Madison, Maryland, Oxford, the Potsdam Institute, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The report estimates that humans intentionally remove about 2.2 billion tons of CO2 per year, roughly 5% of annual emissions, almost entirely through conventional methods like tree planting, forest management, soil sequestration, and wetland restoration. Novel approaches such as direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced weathering, and biochar account for less than 1%, growing from 1.4 million tons in 2023 to 2 million in 2025. To stay on a 1.5C path, novel removal would need to reach 70 million tons by 2030 and 360 million by 2035.
Our take (Context): The numbers stand up because the report aggregates published indicators rather than projecting from vendor claims, but the 1.5C framing now depends on emissions cuts that are not happening. Worth noting the report bundles very different technologies under novel CDR, and biochar dominates the growth, which raises durability and accounting questions the headline figures do not address.
-> Read the full piece at Heatmap News
Captain Drawdown is flagging this. The reporting is Heatmap News’s. Go read them directly, not a rewrite from us.
Source: Heatmap CDR