Governments communicating
on the future of carbon dioxide removal
Overview
Carbon dioxide removal is increasingly recognized as an essential component of long-term climate stabilization, yet the question of how governments should prepare for and support its deployment remains largely unanswered. While existing initiatives have helped advance scientific understanding, technology development, market formation, and investment, much less attention has been devoted to helping governments develop the policies, institutions, financing mechanisms, and governance frameworks needed to coordinate and scale these efforts over time. The Vancouver Process was created to help fill this gap. It provides a voluntary forum where governments, drawing on input and support from many outisde experts and stakeholder groups, can share lessons of experience, identify common challenges, explore opportunities for cooperation, and begin building the foundations for long-term international collaboration on carbon dioxide removal.
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Latest News & Analysis
Why CDR?
Global average temperatures are now 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and will continue to rise. Over the past decade, the IPCC, UNEP, IEA, and numerous national scientific academies have concluded that there are no realistic pathways to long-term temperature stabilization that rely on emissions reductions alone. Every credible pathway to limiting warming includes large-scale carbon dioxide removal alongside rapid decarbonization. The challenge for how to accomplish this is therefore not one of need but speed and scale. Most climate scenarios require removing around ten billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by mid-century, yet today’s global CDR capacity remains negligible by comparison.
Why governments?
Scaling carbon dioxide removal is ultimately an infrastructure challenge. It requires long-term planning, standards development, just and transparent oversight and regulation, sustainable financing, workforce development, and coordination across jurisdictions. Throughout history, governments have played central roles in developing such systems—from transportation networks, to power and telecommunication grids, to sanitation and public health systems. And yet to date, much of the responsibility for scaling CDR has been left to voluntary carbon markets and private investment, which has not been able to scale CDR to climate-relevant levels. Experts incresingly agree that the time for greater government involvement has arrived.
