Temporary carbon removal could help support climate goals

Persistent methane emissions from sectors such as agriculture and growing debates over the credibility of carbon offsets are creating new challenges for governments and companies pursuing net-zero commitments. New research suggests temporary carbon storage may have a scientifically valid role in helping support climate goals, if used in the right way.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is widely regarded as essential for achieving the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. Yet, most carbon removal methods currently deployed only store carbon temporarily rather than permanently, raising questions about how these approaches should be treated in climate policy and carbon markets. A growing body of research has shown that using temporary CDR to “cancel out” CO₂ emissions is physically flawed, because CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for centuries.

The new study, published in Nature by scientists from IIASA, Peking University in China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Maryland in the United States, and the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement in France, provides a physics-based framework for using temporary carbon dioxide removal to compensate for short-lived climate pollutants such as methane.

The findings show that temporary forms of carbon removal can play a significant role in climate mitigation, but not by offsetting carbon dioxide emissions directly. Instead, the researchers found that temporary CDR is well suited to compensate for short-lived climate forcers such as methane (CH₄), because methane and temporary carbon storage affect the climate over similar timescales. By contrast, the study confirms that temporary carbon storage cannot fully offset carbon dioxide emissions, because CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for centuries to millennia.

“Our study set out to answer the following question: if temporary CDR cannot offset CO₂, what can it legitimately offset?” explains lead author Yue He of Peking University and guest researcher at IIASA. “We developed a physics-based framework to identify where temporary CDR does have a valid and quantifiable role in climate accounting.”

Using climate metrics already embedded in international reporting systems, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the team calculated the amount of temporary carbon storage needed to compensate for different greenhouse gases. The authors found that neutralizing the climate impact of 1 kilogram of methane would require removing roughly 498 kilograms of CO₂ stored for 20 years, for example, in bioplastics, or about 101 kilograms stored for 100 years, such as in durable wood construction materials. The results indicate that these compensation relationships remain relatively stable across different time horizons, making the framework robust and practical for policy applications.

“Not all greenhouse gases behave the same way, and not all carbon storage needs to be permanent to be genuinely useful,” said coauthor and IIASA senior research scholar, Thomas Gasser. “Temporary CDR has real climate value, but only when it is matched to the right type of emissions.”

The work builds on earlier research that highlighted the limitations of treating temporary and permanent carbon removal as interchangeable. Rather than stopping at what temporary CDR cannot do, the new study defines a physically grounded role for it and translates that insight into a practical accounting framework with concrete compensation ratios for policymakers and inventory compilers.

“Rather than forcing temporary CDR into a framework designed for permanent solutions, thereby distorting accounting and undermining climate goals, we show there is a legitimate and quantifiable role for it, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors,” notes IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program Director Keywan Riahi, who was also a study coauthor.

The findings have important implications for sectors where cutting emissions remains especially difficult and where non-CO₂ gases dominate, such as in the agricultural sector. Countries with large livestock industries, including New Zealand and Brazil, face persistent methane emissions that are challenging to eliminate completely. The framework provides a scientifically rigorous basis for compensating those emissions using temporary carbon storage. To implement such an approach in practice, the researchers argue that climate accounting systems would need to adopt a “two-basket” framework that separately treats short-lived and long-lived climate forcers according to their fundamentally different behavior in the atmosphere. However, because methane emissions are continuous, temporary carbon removal would also need to be deployed continuously over time to maintain its climate benefit.

The authors emphasize that temporary CDR has a legitimate role in supporting climate goals, but it should complement rather than replace direct emission reductions where those are achievable.

Reference
He, Y., Riahi, K., Gidden, M.J., Piao, S., Wang, T. & Gasser, T. (2026). Temporary carbon dioxide removal to offset short-lived climate forcers. Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10607-3

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at