The state of carbon removal in 3 charts
The carbon removal industry lags behind where it needs to go in the next 6 years to fulfill the Paris Agreement. Read More

The second edition of The State of Carbon Removal report provides a deep examination of where the carbon removal industry stands today, where it needs to go this century to meet Paris climate targets, and the biggest factors that will influence how we get there.
Published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the University of Oxford and several other organizations, the study gives a sobering yet hopeful assessment of human-driven carbon removal.
While rapid and steep emission cuts are the most critical factor for achieving the Paris Agreement goal of limiting planetary warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less, there is no Paris-aligned scenario that does not also require rapid growth in carbon removal in the coming three decades.
To achieve the Paris Agreement targets, in the next 25 years we must restore our planet’s native ecosystems, removing billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere in the process, and increase technology-enabled durable carbon removal by around 1,500x from today’s levels.
Here are three charts that sum up the state of the industry today and where we need to most urgently invest.
Nearly all carbon removal today occurs via nature-based pathways

In 2023, human activity removed some 2.2 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, storing it in sinks that can hold that carbon on a timescale of decades or more.
More than 99.9 percent of this drawdown occurred via nature-based removal pathways, sometimes called conventional removal pathways. Conventional carbon removal is overwhelmingly driven by forest restoration and improved forest management; other nature-based removal pathways include wetland restoration and soil carbon sequestration.
Of the 1.3 million tons of CO2 removal that came from novel drawdown methods, the majority took place via three pathways: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), biochar and enhanced rock weathering.
Nature-based removals must nearly double in the coming 6 years to stay on track

To achieve the Paris targets, carbon removal must rise from around 2.2 billion tons of CO2 per year today to over 4 billion tons by 2030. Nature-based removals, such as ecosystem restoration and agroforestry, will deliver some 97 percent of this.
Country-level carbon removal pledges fall short of even best-case-scenario Paris pathways

Adding up all country-level nationally determined contributions, governments have pledged to increase global carbon removal by 500 million tons of CO2 per year by 2030. But this is only half of the growth in carbon removal needed in the next six years, even in the very best scenarios, which assume dramatic and steep global emission cuts.
In other words, we need to get much more ambitious about the future of carbon removal.
Carbon removal: last but not later
There’s an inverse relationship between the amount of carbon removal needed to stay Paris-consistent and emission reductions: The steeper the emission cuts we achieve in the next six years, the less reliant we’ll be on carbon removal to limit climate damage. The slower we are to decarbonize our economy, the more carbon we’ll need to remove via conventional and novel pathways.
Relying too heavily on gigatonne-scale carbon removal to limit the impacts of climate change is risky. The capacity of nature to remove carbon from the atmosphere is limited by total land on Earth and other land use needs, such as food production. And tech-enabled CDR may not scale as much or as quickly as we hope.
Even in the best-case-scenarios, though, we’ll need to more than triple our planetary capacity to capture and sequester carbon in the coming three decades.
The report’s conclusion is clear: Aggressive investment into nature restoration this decade is nonnegotiable. Alongside this, we’ll need to ramp up both public and private investment into novel carbon removal technologies to protect the quality of life of future generations.
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