Nigel Topping, UN High-Level Climate Action Champion for COP26, launches our conversations with a fascinating look at how carbon removals fit into climate action and what it will take to get to scale.
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Shifting from if to how
The IPCC tells us we’ve got to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to have a chance of keeping 1.5 degrees alive AND we must remove substantial amounts of CO2 from the air. It’s not an either/or choice -- we need both.
Gabrielle Walker features among many other high level speakers in this TED Countdown film that asks the question, 'Is there a role for carbon credits in the transition to a fair, net-zero future?'
Carbon removals: How to distinguish the good, the bad and the very ugly
TED Countdown New York
In June, TED Countdown hosted a Dilemma Session in New York focusing on the role of carbon credits in climate action. Gabrielle Walker and Delia Meth-Cohn of Rethinking Removals joined forces with Julio Friedmann (Carbon Direct) and Eli Mitchell-Larson (Carbon Gap) to design and present a workshop on carbon removals. We were aiming to focus on understanding quality criteria such as additionality and durability - but we started by looking at why we see carbon removals as a source of hope for climate action, not as climate denial or and moral hazard.
Here, Delia takes us through the stages of that event.
At COP26 we ran a UNFCCC Futures Lab on reimagining carbon removals. An amazing group of speakers described their vision of a 2050 future where removals had helped achieve net zero, brought the Global South into the heart of climate action, leveraged the best of nature and tech and complemented robust reduction pathways.
Carbon removals was not on the official agenda at COP26, but the emerging ecosystem was out in force - and collaborating ever more closely - at both COP and TED Countdown.
Carbon removal is not on the official agenda at COP26, but it’s being talked about a lot around the edges. We teamed up with our friends at Carbon Removal Advocacy Europe (launching under a new name at COP!) to pull together all the side-events we could find focusing on carbon removals.
Climate science shows unequivocally that there is a big missing piece in the efforts to achieve net zero and meet the Paris climate goals. In addition to reducing carbon emissions, we will also have to remove very substantial amounts of carbon from the air and store it somewhere safe.
In our conversation with Nigel Topping, Ugbaad Koser, Eli Mitchell-Larson and Patrick Buergi, we started thinking about all the different mindsets that are needed to pour positive energy into carbon removals.
Since we need removals to get to net zero, how can we do them right?
Webinar
No matter how fast we go on reducing emissions, science tells us that we will need to remove carbon on a gigatonne scale to stay within 1.5°C. It's a polarizing topic, but we urgently have to agree on how to tackle this challenge.
In this TED talk, Gabrielle Walker, Director of Valence Solutions and Founder of Rethinking Removals, will explore what it will take to remove carbon from the sky - and do it permanently and at scale, until the climate starts healing.
Getting positive about carbon negative. How do we get removals right?
Edinburgh, Scotland
Carbon removals raises lots of difficult questions. It’s tempting to turn away, but this session will look the issue squarely in the eye and ask: since we need removals to get to net zero, how can we do them right?
