Global negative emission potential across scales: Envisioning resilient, equitable, and effective portfolios

Stanford Energy Research Consortium (SERC)

Background

Negative emissions technologies (NETs) comprise a wide range of technologies including forestry and soil-based interventions (also known as natural climate solutions, NCS), enhanced weathering (EW), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC). Each negative emissions technology (NET) has different levels of technological readiness, costs, energy consumption, land required, and socio-economic impacts. Significant challenges remain in economics, environmental justice, earth system feedbacks, and scaling over orders of magnitude and there is an urgent need for frameworks that evaluate the full range of NET impacts and inform strategies for NET deployment.

NET project concept map — **Figure 1: Overall project concept.** This schematic shows the three scales of the research agenda: local, regional, and earth-system. Images re-purposed from Sanchez *et al*., 2019(1) & Friedlingstein, *et al*., 2019(2).

[1]Sanchez, D, B Houlton, and Whendee Silver (2019), ‘UC experts can lead on carbon dioxide removal’, California Agriculture, 73 (2), 69-72.
² Friedlingstein, et al., Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 1783–1838, 2019, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-11-1783-2019.

Approach

To understand the relationships between vulnerability, responsibility, and impacts at the local scale, the team will calculate US county-level potential for NET implementation using a framework that takes into consideration metrics of responsibility, capability, equity (Pozo et al., 2020)³, and vulnerability. This work will use environmental justice literature to determine where, and by whom, the burden and opportunity of NET deployment lies. The hypothesis that there is a spatial mismatch between places with the most capability for NET implementation, and those with the most responsibility and/or vulnerability will be tested.

Team Members

Chris Field
Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the university’s hub for interdisciplinary environmental research, and Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University. Field’s research focuses on global climate change and ecology. His work includes examining long–term trends in forest stocks and climate influence on wildfire risk. Born in Dinuba, California, Field has done extensive research involving California ecosystems and is a leading expert on climate-change ecology of California.

Connor Nolan
Connor Nolan is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and in the Department of Biology at Stanford. His research efforts include connecting science and decision-making around natural climate solutions, understanding fundamental controls on carbon storage in the terrestrial biosphere, and quantifying vegetation disequilibrium and its impacts on fire risk. Nolan received his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 2019, where his work was at the intersection of paleoclimatology and paleoecology.

Kyles Hemes
Kyles Hemes is an environmental scientist and an affiliate at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment studying land-based solutions to climate change. With expertise at the interface of ecosystem ecology and climate science, he uses observational, modeling, and synthesis techniques to understand how natural and working lands can be harnessed to aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Hemes has worked across a variety of landscapes from the upland sub-tropical forests of southeast Asia to the subsided peatlands of the California Delta to better characterize the potential for ecosystems to be part of the solution.