An international team of researchers has highlighted the risk of relying too much on carbon removal technologies to limit climate change in a new study published in Nature.
Carbon removal technologies are often seen as a great solution to the challenge of limiting global warming to within 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
However, the detrimental effects of climate change on crop yields could reduce the capacity of large-scale bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and threaten food security, creating an unrecognised positive feedback loop on global warming, the study says.
The team behind the research comprises scientists from the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and several other institutions around the world.
Using the shared socioeconomic pathways of climate mitigation, the researchers designed a number of scenarios in which the deployment of large-scale mitigation...