Last week, more than 260 researchers convened in Milan to discuss the opportunities, challenges and risks involved in scaling “carbon dioxide removal” (CDR) to help curb climate change.
The conference – held on the campus of the Politecnico di Milano – is the fourth in a series, with previous editions held in Oxford, UK in 2024, and Gothenburg, Sweden in 2018 and 2022.
A broad range of academics – from forests, oceans and soils experts through to social and political scientists – discussed the co-benefits and trade-offs involved in drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, as well as the ways policy could drive CDR deployment.
Dr Soheil Shayegh, director of the industrial and planetary carbon cycle programme at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), told Carbon Brief the idea behind the conference was to “bring scientists together to convey a message to policymakers about where the technology stands”.
He continued: “We should be very clear that there still are huge uncertainties about the effectiveness of lots of this CDR technology – are they marketable or not? But what is clear for us is the need for CDR.”
