Despite the knowledge of the climate crisis, global emissions continue to rise. Therefore, in almost all scenarios, including those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is from utmost important to not only reduce emissions worldwide to net zero as quickly as possible, but to also actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Without these approaches, the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement won`t be met.

Therefore, the Risk Dialogue Foundation conducted a stakeholder dialogue on the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on behalf of the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) in 2017-2019. Such approaches and technologies are often summarised under the term Negative Emission Technologies or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). More than 25 stakeholders from various NGOs, government agencies, academia, business and politics participated.

The basis for the stakeholder dialogue was laid in a preceding dialogue project with leading scientists. The result of the project was a whitepaper in which the scientists addressed the public, as they want this issue to be addressed in a public dialogue.

In a second step, the Foundation conducted the stakeholder dialogue mentioned at the beginning. The aim of this dialogue was to identify opportunities and risks for Switzerland together with Swiss-based stakeholders with expertise in the field of CDR or who are directly affected by the application of CDR, and to develop recommendations on how CDR can best be integrated into Swiss climate policy. The project used the available knowledge base of all stakeholders to deepen the understanding in terms of governance, communication and scaling of CDR with this report. Finally, the aim of this report was to recommend measures to minimise potential CDR and climate risks and to take advantage of opportunities. The report is available under Downloads.

Furthermore, the results of the projects were incorporated into the Swiss 2050 net-zero emissions climate target adopted by the Federal Council on 28 August 2019. Switzerland is thus one of the first countries in the world to take an official position on negative emission technologies (CDR).

You can find the FOEN page and further information on Negative Emission Technologies in relation to the newly communicated (in August 2019) climate target 2050 as well as our dialogue projects here.

The created base for a public dialogue must now take place as a matter of urgency in order to jointly decide how Switzerland can achieve the Paris climate targets with the highest possible certainty through mitigation measures and CDR.