Negative Emissions in Climate Policy — Scenarios, Governance, and Challenges

Negative emissions play an increasingly important role in climate policy scenarios. As a consequence, the scientific literature on carbon removal technologies has been expanding quickly in recent years. This literature focuses, however, predominantly on technical aspects, potentials for deployment, and costs. Still, the level of uncertainty associated with some of these technologies, especially those that go beyond ecosystem-based approaches, remains high. This chapter gives an overview of this literature, but especially addresses questions regarding (a) impacts of negative emissions technologies on sustainable development that go beyond carbon dioxide (CO2) removal and (b) the design of climate policy frameworks needed to foster the deployment of CDR (especially with respect to net-negative emissions). Despite the attention devoted recently to negative emissions, the latter aspect in particular has so far been often neglected in academic as well as political discussions.