NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 3 (IPS) – A new one global study has challenged a key assumption in climate planning: that the planet’s geological “carbon vault” is large enough to hold all the carbon dioxide (CO₂) we might ever want to bury underground after removing it from the atmosphere. It’s not.
After taking into account seismic zones, protected areas and densely populated areas, researchers estimate that the conservative planetary limit for geological carbon storage is about 1,460 GtCO₂ – still a significant amount, but a fraction of the 11,800 GtCO₂ often cited as ‘technical’ potential.
This finding merits a reconsideration of all strategies that rely on essentially unlimited underground storage. It also strengthens the case for a diversified portfolio approach that uses every credible tool at our disposal, rather than relying too heavily on a single bet.
We must take a pragmatic approach to achieve both integrity and scale. For too long, the debate has been framed as ‘permanent’ versus ‘non-permanent’ climate solutions – as if the only climate value that matters is storage, measured in centuries or millennia. Regardless of the available geological storage, that is a crucial mistake. Climate risk unfolds over multiple time horizons; therefore our response must also be multi-faceted.
There is real value in reductions and storage on a ten-year scale. Lowering atmospheric CO₂ in coming years will reduce peak warming, a key driver most associated with causing irreversible tipping points – from forest die-offs to ice sheet instability and shifts in ocean circulation.
Even if some of the carbon is re-emitted later, the avoided heat during those crucial decades buys time to scale up technologies, protects people and nature from increasing impacts, and reduces the chance of dangerous thresholds being exceeded.
Engineering removals and geological storage can provide very long-lived storage, but as this report shows, there is still much to learn. At the same time, nature-based solutions – especially forests and other ecosystems – can deliver large emissions reductions and removals in the short term, while delivering irreplaceable co-benefits: biodiversity, water security, community resilience and livelihoods.
Both are essential. By pitting them against each other, we are wasting time we don’t have.
Uncertainty about the long-term stability of land carbon stocks does not mean that all of nature will ‘go up in smoke’. It means we need risk management, not exclusion. Take, for example, the sustainability standard recently adopted for Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, which equates “negligible risk” with storage that is effectively guaranteed over a 100-year horizon.
Formulated this way, most nature-based solutions are excluded because uncertainties accumulate over time. The right test is whether systems deliver real, additional and sustainable climate benefits over relevant time frames – and whether risks are transparently taken into account and continually reduced.
Every financial advisor learns the same lesson: diversify to manage risk and improve returns. Climate strategy is no different. No single approach – technological or nature-based – can deliver the speed, scale and sustainability we need. The The sixth assessment report of the IPCC underlines that nature-based solutions, in particular forests, can cost-effectively close a significant part of the short-term ambition gap – on the order of 4-6 GtCO₂ per year by 2030.
That is a huge climate benefit if it is managed with integrity and social safeguards. It is also a necessary condition for the success of the Paris Agreement.
A portfolio approach matches the instruments to the time horizon, hedges systemic risks and multiplies the co-benefits. Sustainable geological storage should be prioritized for the most difficult-to-mitigate residuals and for truly permanent disposal needs; and high-quality natural climate solutions must be accelerated now due to the severe near-term uplift that lowers peak warming and keeps tipping points out of reach.
If one component underperforms, the others will continue to deliver climate benefits. And by investing in nature, societies gain adaptation, biodiversity and development dividends that pure sequestration cannot provide.
Policy must respond to this reality. Integrity and oversight must be strengthened for all solutions so that markets can function with confidence: robust principles, conservative accounting, credible buffer pools, reversal risk insurance, high-quality MRV and clear liability rules.
Standards must move away from effectively impossible definitions of ‘negligible risk’ and towards recognizing the ten-year climate value, requiring strong safeguards and the use of diversified portfolios. Governments should encourage innovation across the spectrum of solutions rather than picking winners; technology-neutral frameworks that reward verified climate outcomes – and recognize different but complementary sustainability profiles – will channel capital where it does the most good.
Science does not give us permission to wait for perfect solutions. It requires an ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ approach – applied sensibly. The new storage estimates should focus the mind and not fuel fatalism. Scarcity guides strategy: use geological capacity where it delivers the greatest long-term value, and scale up high-integrity, nature-based and demand-side actions now to bend the curve this decade and reduce the likelihood of dangerous tipping points.
This is what a prudent, diversified climate portfolio looks like.
We will not solve a multidimensional crisis with one lever. We will solve it by using all credible levers at once, with integrity, urgency and a love of learning.
The toolbox is full. It’s time to use it.
IPS UN Office
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