Negative emissions technologies (NETs) – new technologies that aim to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere – have “limited realistic potential” in meeting the Paris Agreement targets, according to a new report published yesterday by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, a body that brings together 29 European national science academies. The academies call for climate change mitigation efforts to be strengthened instead of relying on these (future) technologies.
The report finds that none of the NETs mentioned in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models can be deployed fast enough or can remove the gigatons of carbon that would be necessary. Moreover, the authors find the large-scale deployment of NETs “would result in high economic costs and likely major impacts on terrestrial or marine ecosystems.”