How carbon dioxide removal lost its way: tracing the origin and transformation of the 10-Gt durable CDR target

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides critical analysis of how a key CDR benchmark was constructed and propagated, essential for scenario users and CDR scholars.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights risks of over-relying on the 10 Gt target without understanding its conditional origins; urge nuanced communication.

🏛政策担当者:Directly relevant for setting realistic and conditional CDR targets, avoiding over-commitment to a decontextualized number.

Durably removing ~10 Gt CO₂ yr⁻¹ by 2050 is widely treated as necessary to meet Paris temperature goals. Tracing CDR magnitude claims across ~50 sources spanning five sectors, I found this benchmark derives from IPCC scenario ensembles in which CDR magnitude correlated with near-term mitigation ambition rather than temperature targets. When targets relaxed, scenarios continued emitting rather than reducing CDR. While both IPCC ensembles and independent studies included scenarios with substantially less CDR, these pathways received little downstream attention. Instead, a single number above the IPCC ensemble median was extracted and, as it propagated into NGO and industry contexts, stripped of its conditionality. Framing became prescriptive, risk discussion diminished, and CDR type narrowed to exclude approaches the scenarios themselves relied upon. The result is a CDR discourse stripped of the context needed for informed decision-making — context connecting removal to mitigation, characterizing costs, risks, and feasibility, and encompassing all available approaches.

• Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/20275831first seen 2026-05-20 04:11:38 · last seen 2026-05-20 04:14:28