Despite ambitious emissions reductions, unavoidable residual emissions will persist in many sectors in the long term. To achieve climate neutrality and enable net-negative emissions in the future, the targeted deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is therefore necessary. At the same time, many CDR approaches are still at early stages of development, are associated with high costs and investment risks, and raise questions regarding permanence, environmental impacts, and societal acceptance. Against this background, appropriate policy instruments are needed to provide investment certainty, foster innovation, and enable the sustainable scale-up of CDR.

On behalf of the German Environment Agency (UBA), Technopolis and the Ecologic Institute are developing policy instruments to support the market uptake of CO₂ removal technologies in Germany. Both nature-based and technological CDR approaches are taken into account. The research project focuses in particular on instruments and policy mixes that can be applied after a pilot phase to enable the large-scale deployment of CDR. In addition, a set of ecological, social, and economic criteria is being developed to assess the proposed policy instruments.