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The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle has clearly shown that Carbon Dioxide removal (CDR) is an essential element of any strategy geared towards achieving the Paris climate goals. Yet, the first edition of the State of CDR Report has indicated a significant gap between how much CDR is deployed even in the most ambitious Paris-consistent mitigation scenarios and countries’ short and long-term plans to scale CDR. The next decade will be decisive for scaling CDR, so swift policy decisions on CDR are necessary. Effective policy decisions should be underpinned by the best available scientific evidence including technology-specific assessments and scenarios exploring trade-offs and synergies in CDR portfolios. This highlights the growing demand for synthetic evidence from a wide range of user groups ranging from policy-makers to the modeling communities. Yet, the literature on CDR has grown exponentially over the last years, requiring rigorous and transparent methodologies for evidence synthesis. The objective and contributions of the work presented here are three-fold:
(1) We aim to show that the evidence on CDR is vast and fast-growing, but very unevenly distributed across different CDR methods, geographies, natural compared to social sciences as well as research designs.
(2) We go beyond the state-of-the-art in CDR assessments like the IPCC, which have been mainly concerned with framing the role of CDR and the various CDR methods in climate change mitigation. CDR assessments have remained coarse and largely unsuitable for informing CDR-related decisions by governments and businesses.
(3) We introduce the concept of a systematic review ecosystem on CDR and describe a community effort that implements the idea to synthesize key pieces of CDR knowledge for evidence-informed decision-making. The aim is to provide a transparent decision basis on the state of science, deployment, risks and side-effects in a comparable way across recognised CDR methods.