Preprints
Search for carbon dioxide removal (47 results)
Unlocking Gigatonne-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal with strategic tipping point frameworks
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Achieving global climate mitigation requires a rapid acceleration of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) to gigatonne (Gt) scales by 2040. Linear growth in climate solutions is insufficient to reach these targets, but system-change practices and leveraging interventions that trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks ("tipping points"), offer a solution. Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) in Brazil is uniquely [...]
Evaluation of biochar produced from coffee husks as an alternative treatment for wastewater contaminated with agrochemicals in the southwestern region of Antioquia.
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Excessive use of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers has enhanced agricultural productivity but has also generated significant environmental impacts and public health risks. Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphorus insecticide, is highly persistent in the environment due to its affinity for organic matter and its ability to be transported via runoff into water bodies, where conventional wastewater [...]
Carbon removal trading can promote economic growth in the Global South but could undermine food and energy security
Published: 2025-07-06
Subjects: Engineering
A fundamental mismatch between countries’ carbon dioxide removal (CDR) responsibilities and their domestic capacities to fulfil them poses a major challenge to achieving the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal. Interregional CDR trade offers a solution, yet there has been no quantitative assessment of how such trade could reshape the economies of exporting regions and impact their [...]
CO2-Based Leaching of Sulfidic Peridotite Drives Critical Mineral Mobilization and Carbonate Precipitation
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology
The transition towards green energy requires both carbon dioxide removal and consistent supplies of energy-critical minerals. Injection and mineralization of supercritical CO2 at active mafic and ultramafic-hosted mines provides a potential avenue to achieve both, through the stable geologic storage of carbon and subsequent mobilization of critical metals. A sample from the Eagle occurrence, an [...]
Separate sectoral decarbonization policies accelerate climate action but could jeopardize key sustainability targets
Published: 2025-06-15
Subjects: Engineering
The Paris Agreement grants countries flexibility in designing their pathways to net-zero emissions, yet most have focused on economy-wide, cost-effective approaches without clearly defining the role of sectoral emission reductions and/or carbon dioxide removal (CDR). These blanket strategies prioritize low-cost sectors, leaving significant residual emissions and relying on uncertain, largely [...]
A realistic climate strategy
Published: 2025-04-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The international climate strategy is failing. Current policies will act too slowly to prevent rising temperatures from crossing critical climate tipping points. IPCC assessments underestimate the non-linear risks and catastrophic costs of overshooting Paris Agreement targets. Opponents of solar geoengineering cite concerns about moral hazard and other potential risks; however, at this juncture [...]
Quantifying potential carbon dioxide removal via enhanced weathering using porewater from a field trial in Scotland
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Engineering
Enhanced weathering (EW) is cited as a promising carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategy, and is being rapidly commercialized. Rigorous monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) are essential to ensure carbon claims are accurate and carbon credits are not mis-sold. MRV protocols incorporate multiple approaches, including soil and porewater sampling. This paper calculates potential CDR from [...]
A practical metric for estimating the current climate forcing of natural mires
Published: 2025-02-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Commensuration of the radiative effects of different greenhouse gases (GHGs) is crucial for understanding the effects of land cover and ecosystem changes on the global climate. However, none of the current commensuration approaches are suitable for addressing the current climatic effect of mire ecosystems as compared to the situation in which such mires would not exist. The mire ecosystems have [...]
Carbon dioxide removal could perpetuate community-scale inequalities of U.S. air pollution in net-zero scenarios
Published: 2024-11-28
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Pathways to net-zero reduce GHG emissions and improve air quality, but the magnitude and distribution of these improvements will depend on specific mitigation decisions, such as the amount of carbon dioxide removals (CDR). Here, we combine a series of models and datasets to analyze community-scale PM2.5 impacts across the contiguous U.S. of net-zero scenarios with different levels of CDR. Both [...]
Improved Precision and Reference Materials for Stable Carbon Isotope Analysis in Basaltic Glasses using Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry
Published: 2024-09-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Volcanology
We introduce three new reference materials and a new high-precision set-up for stable carbon isotope analysis in basaltic glasses using large-geometry secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) instrument. The new hydrous basaltic reference materials, characterised for carbon concentration and isotope composition by step-heating gas extraction and manometry followed by isotope ratio mass [...]
Constraining Earth's core composition from inner core nucleation.
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Mineral Physics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences
The composition of Earth’s core is a fundamental property of the Earth’s deep interior, defining its present structure and long term thermal and magnetic evolution. However, the composition of the core is not well understood, with several combinations of light elements being able to satisfy the traditional constraints from cosmochemistry, core formation and seismology.The traditional view of [...]
Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action
Published: 2024-02-17
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Although the 2015 Paris Agreement climate targets seem certain to be missed, only a few experts are questioning the adequacy of the current approach to limiting climate change and suggesting that additional approaches are needed to avoid unacceptable catastrophes. This article posits that selective science communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that [...]
Monitoring CO2 Concentrations in Soil Gas: A Novel MRV Approach for Cropland-Based ERW?
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
This paper discusses the challenges we have faced in the past 2.5 years of field experiments trying to measure the speed of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) in agricultural settings for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Traditional measurements that allow quantification of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in laboratory ERW tests include chemical analyses of the leached out soil water and monitoring [...]
Methods for assessing Giant Kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) biomass sinking rates and decomposition for carbon dioxide removal applications
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
One promising carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategy to achieve negative emissions of carbon dioxide is the sinking of farmed seaweed into the ocean where it may be sequestered. Methods to quantify the sinking rates, degradation rates and the release of degradation products from kelp is fundamental to understanding the durability of the strategy if applied to scale. The aim of this white paper is [...]
The Certainty of Uncertainty in Atmospheric CO2 Removal: A Crisis-Response Abrupt Mitigation Scenario (CRAMS)
Published: 2023-12-04
Subjects: Climate, Sustainability
The gap between current emission trend and the expected 1.5 °C warming target forces the deployment of different carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDRs). Even though large discrepancies and uncertainties presents in studies investigating the CDR potentials, costs and side effects of bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture with CO2 storage (DACCS) and enhanced [...]