I​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​n a new report released last week, UNEP raised the white flag, officially conceding global temperatures will soon blow past the 1.5C goal set 11 years ago by the Paris Climate Agreement. What comes next is anyone’s guess. UNEP concludes the world should settle in for decades of warmer temperatures to come, and continued climate-related destabilization to global economies, food supplies, health outcomes, and ecosystems.

It also concludes we should finally, once and for all, this time we really mean it, get serious about our emissions reduction efforts. Never mind these efforts haven’t managed to reduce emissions yet, at least in total — we’ve been releasing around 40-42 gigatons of human-caused CO2 per year since the Paris Agreement was signed. All this aside, emissions reductions should remain the overwhelming focus of our climate policy going forward, combined with, of course, a much more robust portfolio of adaptation measures our world will need to cope with rising temperatures.

Conspicuously, there is no Plan B. UNEP’s report treats carbon dioxide removal (CDR) more like part of the problem than part of the solution — it’s emissions reductions or bust. The report concedes we’ll need CDR, but its overall conclusion is we shouldn’t expect it to do very much because CDR will take a long time to scale, geological storage could become a constraint, some large-scale approaches will compete for land needed for food security and biodiversity, and even 10 gigatons per year of net-negative emissions would reverse warming by only about 0.05C per decade. Even without debating the veracity of these arguments — some approaches will scale faster than others, not all CDR relies on geological storage, trees will not play a huge role, 10 gigatons of net negative is hardly an obvious upper limit, and so on — the report’s deep skepticism toward CDR is startling.

There’s a double standard to UNEP’s logic, of course. The report assumes we can dramatically reduce emissions over the next few decades, and also assumes that scaling CDR to climate-relevant levels will be difficult, risky, and ultimately only marginally effective. Both assumptions are fraught with caveats, asterisks, what-ifs and evidence to the contrary, yet UNEP builds its climate strategy around the first while portraying the second as a cautionary tale. The report does call for more CDR research, investment, and innovation, but without seriously exploring how much larger a role CDR might ultimately be able to play. This omission only reinforces the perception that UNEP’s position on CDR was preordained.

What’s also alarming is that, given the persistence of our carbon emissions, we might need far more than 10 Gt/y of net negative to avoid extreme warming over the next few centuries. As noted in our last essay, if total human-caused CO2 emissions remain near their current levels, then 60 gigatons per year of CDR will be needed just to keep temperatures around 2C (producing about 18 Gt/y of net negative), and 100 Gt/y will be required to drop below 1C in the century that follows. Therefore, tethering our climate policy to the assumptions that we won’t need a lot of CDR and that it won’t be very helpful anyway will only hamstring our ability to respond effectively to the possible dimensions of the CO2 removal challenge ahead.

So what now? One approach CDRANet is championing is to encourage governments to become more directly involved in CDR. This is the basic premise behind the Vancouver Process. The goal of this effort isn’t simply to subsidize a few removal projects or plan for a modest expansion of the CDR marketplace, but to work together to build a new framework for action where governments can engage much more directly in the future of CDR. What UNEP’s report got right was to acknowledge governments need new policy frameworks and institutions to scale CDR. This is certainly part of the equation. Direct government action is another part.

We also need to look harder at approaches that have the potential to scale quickly and cheaply. Ocean CDR might be one such possibility. Solid-carbon approaches might be another. A portfolio strategy will also likely be essential, with some CDR approaches being more useful in some regions than others, and with many smaller efforts adding up. But so will continuing to search for home-run solutions capable of very large removals; we cannot simply assume that thousands of small removal projects will someday add up to the tens of gigatons of carbon removals we might actually need.

This is precisely why the limitations UNEP identifies should prompt more investment in CDR, not less. The fact we don’t know exactly how to deploy CDR yet at climate-relevant scales is not an argument against CDR. Quite the opposite, it’s an argument for figuring out how to do this sooner rather than later, and for giving this effort the attention and support it needs to succeed.

Of course, in the meantime, emissions need to come down if we can manage this, and the faster they do, the smaller and more manageable the CDR challenge becomes. Every ton we avoid emitting is one less ton we need to remove, and nothing about aggressively developing CDR should weaken the pressure on governments to reduce emissions wherever they can.

But emissions reduction and CDR both need to move forward on equal footing, working in tandem to approach this monumental challenge. We cannot afford to risk leaving CDR to the marketplace alone, nor can we risk relegating it to the margins of global climate policy.