The RESCUE (Response of the Earth System to overshoot, Climate neUtrality and negative Emissions) project aims to expand our understanding of the potential role of both land- and ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques in future mitigation scenarios.
Through the Paris Agreement, the world’s nations have committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to limit the warming to 1.5°C.
To achieve these goals, it is critical to reach climate neutrality by mid-century. However, current climate policies fall short of the necessary cuts in CO2 emissions. Further delays in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to temperature overshoot beyond the Paris Agreement targets, and the most ambitious pathways that still would limit global warming to 1.5°C are virtually impossible without a temporary temperature overshoot.
There is a strong agreement within the climate science and policy communities that climate change mitigation through emission reduction alone, although urgent and necessary, will not anymore be enough to achieve these goals. CDR might help to tackle the enormous mitigation challenges that have accumulated over the past decades.
RESCUE explores the potential role of CDR methods like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation/reforestation, and ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) in plausible future scenarios.
In NORCE we further develop the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) to be able to simulate such scenarios. We then use the upgraded Earth system model to explore the effectiveness of CDR methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it durably, and to investigate potential side effects.
