The Sorry State of Carbon Removal

The gap between the world’s current capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the amount we’ll need to remove to materially address climate change is so large, it's hard to fathom crossing it. Now, a new report warns that the chasm is widening.

The third State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, published on Tuesday, finds that while carbon removal research and deployment has advanced significantly in the past two years, it is still not growing quickly enough to reach the scale required to support the Paris Agreement temperature limits. Carbon emissions, meanwhile, have continued to rise globally, raising the amount of carbon removal required in turn.

“We’re seeing a lot of signs that there’s still growth happening,” Morgan Edwards, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the authors, told me. “But we need to see a step change in both early indicators like investment and also actual deployments” between now and 2030, in addition to serious emission reductions, she said.

The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal is a project between researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Maryland, the University of Oxford, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The latest report collates a wide range of indicators to assemble a detailed portrait of progress in the sector, from the number of research papers and patents published, to project deployments, costs, and investment, to voluntary purchases and policies.

The world currently removes approximately 2.2 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year through intentional human activity, the authors found, which is equivalent to about 5% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all of that carbon removal happens through what the authors deem “conventional” methods, which include planting trees, improved forest management, soil sequestration on farms and grasslands, and coastal wetland restoration.

Less than 1% of the 2.2 billion tons comes from “novel” methods such as direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture, enhanced weathering, and biochar, the most common method. Novel carbon removal increased from 1.4 million tons in 2023 to 2 million tons in 2025, with biochar responsible for most of that. In total, novel forms of carbon removal have to grow to 70 million by 2030 and 360 million by 2035 for the world to achieve net zero and begin to reverse warming back down to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, the authors found. And that’s assuming the emissions curve starts to bend dramatically downward.

“The gap will continue to grow if we do not pursue immediate and ambitious emissions reductions today,” Edwards said. Though the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree goal looks to be receding further out of reach, she stressed that net-zero emissions implies significant carbon removal, regardless of what temperature target you’re aiming for.

No matter how you look at it, getting to 70 million tons by 2030 would require a major shift. Right now, the most optimistic expectation for how much the carbon removal industry will grow by that point, based on corporate announcements, is about 42 million tons per year by 2030, according to the report. The capacity in the pipeline from projects that are under construction, however, amounts to just 8.4 million by 2030. At the country level, only about a third of national climate strategies even mention novel carbon removal methods, and overall carbon removal ambition among countries would have to double to close the 2030 gap.

This isn’t impossible — other technologies have achieved comparable growth rates. The report’s authors estimate that carbon removal would have to scale at speeds similar to solar power and electric vehicles. Unlike those singular solutions, however, carbon removal consists of many different technologies that intersect with a range of industries — oil and gas drilling, farming, forestry, mining — and therefore may not scale as linearly. Also, unlike EVs and solar, carbon removal isn’t a useful product with an obvious market. It’s a public good, like waste management — and an expensive one, at that.

Carbon removal funding is also highly concentrated, the authors warn, making the industry vulnerable to sudden shifts in policy and investment appetite. For example, Microsoft alone has made more than 80% of carbon removal purchases to date; then in April it confirmed it was pausing procurements, leaving behind major uncertainty over who, if anyone, will fill its role in the market. Similarly, most government funding for pilot projects to date has concentrated in three countries — the U.S., Sweden, and Denmark — but more recently the U.S. has dismantled much of its support.

The industry is also concentrated in terms of deployment. Biochar and bioenergy with carbon capture account for almost all of the 2 million tons of novel removals the authors identified. Direct air capture facilities removed just 1,500 tons in 2025, according to the report. All of that came from Climeworks’ two facilities in Iceland — Orca and Mammoth — and it’s significantly less than the roughly 40,000 tons these facilities were designed to capture each year. (While there are a few other direct air capture plants operating, they have not yet had any removals certified by a third party, and so were not included in the estimate.)

There are some bright spots in the report. Research funding, scientific publications, demonstration projects, public policies, and private investment in carbon removal are all trending up. It’s just that the results of these efforts — in terms of patents, projects under construction, and the amount of carbon being removed — are uneven.

While the report is a valiant effort to assess how far carbon removal has come, the overall picture remains deeply uncertain. That word, “uncertain,” appears over and over, applying to such questions as:

• current and future public support for carbon removal
• feasible levels of scaling for different methods
• cost of removal for different methods
• the amount of carbon removal countries have pledged to do
• future emissions and the climate’s response to both emissions and removals
• how effective different CDR approaches will be in a changing climate
• what’s happening with the United States’ Direct Air Capture Hubs program
• how to measure geochemical methods such as enhanced weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement

The authors emphasize the need for more research, public policy, and funding to narrow these uncertainties — especially on the demand side of the equation.

“Both demand and supply side policies are important for innovation, but much of the policy we’ve seen for CDR today has been more supply-side focused,” said Edwards. “There’s a need for a strong signal to companies who are developing these technologies and implementing CDR on the ground that the demand will be there.”