Carbon removal will need to grow faster than solar power to meet climate commitments

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) comprises a wide range of activities aimed at capturing atmospheric CO₂ and storing it in geological, terrestrial or oceanic reservoirs, or within products. Due to the slow implementation of global policies on emissions reductions, we are rapidly approaching the 1.5 °C global warming limit set by the Paris Agreement. Due to this inaction, the need to actively capture CO₂ is becoming increasingly evident as a complementary measure to the rapid and significant reduction of emissions. All scenarios achieving net-zero emissions include the deployment of CDR on the scale of Gt CO₂/year.

The third edition of The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report is an independent initiative driven by the world’s leading experts on the many aspects that need to be considered when assessing the current state of global carbon capture initiatives and analysing the barriers to scaling them up to the required levels.

The report highlights how 2.2 GtCO₂/year is currently captured, equivalent to 5% of total CO₂ emissions. A distinction is made between conventional CDR and new techniques, with the latter accounting for just 0.1% of the total. New techniques are growing at a rate of 40% per year; however, the report emphasises that this growth remains insufficient for targets compatible with the Paris Agreement.

Another important aspect highlighted by the report is the growing gap between the amount of CDR planned by countries in their respective nationally determined contributions and the amount required according to the median of Paris Agreement-compatible scenarios. Despite the need to increase both research into new CDR techniques and their subsequent implementation, only a third of countries report these techniques in their nationally determined contributions.

The report provides a comprehensive and reliable snapshot of the current state of CDR globally and of the barriers, vulnerabilities and risks that still limit its growth. In this regard, its content offers valuable guidance for the development and implementation of effective national and international policies for climate change mitigation.

The third edition of the analysis on the state of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is once again a study of high scientific quality, produced by over 100 authors from leading global institutions. Its methodology involves a rigorous peer-review process, utilises publicly available data updated to 2025, and employs proprietary scenarios that are more finely calibrated than in previous editions. The limitations are clearly specified chapter by chapter, which reinforces the transparency and independence of the results. In institutional terms, it is the equivalent of the IPCC for CDR: the global scientific benchmark in the field.

Among the highlighted limitations, a key point is an uncertainty of approximately 20% in estimates of conventional CDR, stemming from the difficulty of separating human-induced CO₂ capture from natural absorption. Novel CDR, for its part, relies on information voluntarily provided by companies, without a mandatory reporting system, which may lead to underestimates. Added to this is the fact that the reference models do not incorporate sequestration associated with the restoration of peatlands or agricultural soils, the potential of which could be significant.

As for the analysis, this is where the report may prove uncomfortable to read, as the picture it paints is more worrying than that of 2024. Novel CDR is growing by 40% annually, but from such a small base that it remains marginal: whilst 2,200 MtCO₂/year comes from afforestation and reforestation, this CDR barely reached 2 MtCO₂ in 2025, that is, just 0.1% of the total—a percentage that frankly should instil a greater sense of urgency than we see in current policies. Added to this is the fact that the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement adds approximately 700 MtCO₂ to the CDR gap by 2050—the most significant change from the previous edition—and that Microsoft, the leading purchaser of novel CDR with 82% of the market, has announced a possible pause in its acquisitions. Both factors contribute to the decline in corporate ambition and the growing fragility of the support system. To complete the picture, no G20 country has a legally binding CDR target, and the NDCs submitted in 2025 did not increase ambition regarding carbon removal.

As for climate targets, the results are quite clear: temporarily exceeding the 1.5 °C threshold is now practically inevitable, given that the remaining carbon budget will be exhausted around 2030. This does not mean that this target is lost forever, as scenarios show that it is possible to return to below that threshold by the end of the century, but it makes CDR an essential tool. And every year of delay in reducing emissions makes that path drastically more costly: a ten-year delay means removing an additional 164 GtCO₂ over the course of the century. Conventional CDR cannot shoulder this burden alone; the land available for forests is finite, forest ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change, and some reforestation commitments have proved unreliable in practice. This report confirms what many in the scientific community have been pointing out: there is no room to choose between reducing emissions or developing CDR. We must do both, and we must start now