International carbon markets are potentially a very powerful tool for mobilizing carbon dioxide removal in line with Paris Agreement ambitions to limit global warming to well below 2°C. This requires reaching global net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. Yet, carbon market regulators have not approached removals in a systematic manner. This review assesses the highly fragmented treatment of removals under compliance and voluntary carbon markets, including baseline, credit and cap-and-trade systems. The Kyoto mechanisms and the large voluntary carbon market standards have long focussed on biological removals without inherent storage permanence and only recently started to develop methodologies for removals with geological storage, mineralization or biochar. Driven by high prices for credits from emerging removal technologies and advance market commitment initiatives targeting high permanence removals, various newcomers in voluntary markets are currently establishing their own approaches for generating removal credits. However, they disregard key concepts safeguarding market quality such as additionality, which risks triggering scandals and tainting the entire market for removal credits. Given the diversity of credit prices spanning three orders of magnitude from 1 to 1000, as well as of volumes ranging from a few hundred to tens of millions of credits, the current “gold rush” atmosphere of removal markets needs to quickly be replaced by a coordinated approach, ensuring credibility, and enabling removals to play the required role in reaching global net zero.

Growing demand for meat and dairy products (MDP), biofuels, and scarcity of agricultural land are drivers of global land use competition. Impacts of policies targeting demand for MDP or biofuels have only been analysed separately. We use the computable general equilibrium model DART-BIO to investigate combined effects, since MDP and biofuel production are closely related via feestock use and co-production of animal feed. We implement four scenarios: (a) a baseline scenario; (b) halving MDP consumption in industrialised countries by a tax; (c) abolishing current biofuel policies; and (d) no exogenous land use change. We find that a MDP tax and exogenous land use change have larger effects on land use and food markets than biofuel policies. International trade is affected in all scenarios. With respect to combined effects of a MDP tax and biofuel policies, we find decreasing biodiesel but increasing bioethanol production. In addition, the MDP tax decreases the impact of biofuel policies on agricultural markets and land use. Our results highlight the importance of a detailed representation of different vegetable oils used in biodiesel production and related by-products. Finally, since the MDP tax increases the use of fossil fuels, the net climate mitigation potentials of such a tax should be investigated further.

Can digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) unlock industrial CO2 capture and removal in carbon markets?, Veen, Paulien, Winkler, Malte, Oh, Soyoung, Michaelowa, Axel