Combating climate change - There is strength in numbers

According to the Paris Agreement, to combat climate change, it is necessary to keep global temperature well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. However, in order to achieve this, CO2 emissions must be significantly reduced. The utilisation of renewable energy sources, and the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere through reforestation and carbon capture and storage, for example, are measures currently taking into consideration.

Although countries have signed up to the Paris Agreement, they have their own quotas, and also their own plans for doing it so. Overall, countries have not agreed in a common working plan, which is necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s target.

According to a recently published paper by an international group of researchers [1], the main issue is how to determine the fairest way to allocate quotas to different countries. Some methods have already been evaluated and, although the quotas can varied significantly from one country to another, the team realised that only few countries could meet any of the quotas using only their own resources.

Reduction of CO2 from the atmosphere can be done through reforestation, but the process is rather slow as CO2 can be naturally absorbed only when trees have grown… and deforestation is, of course, not helping! [2]. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it in underground geological formations [3]. The main drawback is that not all nations have the capability to implement these CO2 removal strategies. The team has suggested that as soon as every country has determined their own quotas, they can trading it in a kind-of special design “trading quotas” system. For example, the UK has abundant space for CCS thanks to favourable geological formations in the North Sea, so could sell some of its capacity to other countries.

References:

[1] Pozo, C., Galán-Martín, Á., Reiner, D.M. et al. Equity in allocating carbon dioxide removal quotas. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0802-4

[2] House, Joanna I. ; Colin Prentice, I. ; Le Quéré, Corinne. Maximum impacts of future reforestation or deforestation on atmospheric CO2. Global Change Biology, November 2002, Vol.8(11), pp.1047-1052. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2486.2002.00536.x

[3] What is CCS? - http://www.ccsassociation.org/what-is-ccs/