Carbon removal in forests and farms in the United States

The ambitious emissions reduction measures modeled in most global emissions pathways are not enough to achieve the Paris Agreement targets for limiting temperature rise. In these pathways, it is also necessary to undertake efforts to remove carbon dioxide (CO2 ) from the atmosphere at the gigaton scale—billions of metric tons per year globally. This paper explores candidate land management approaches for carbon removal in the United States, including carbon removal in forests and farms. There is untapped potential to increase carbon removal in America’s forests and farms. However, although marginal costs of implementation are generally below US$50/metric ton of CO2 (tCO2 ), deploying these approaches at large scale will require addressing a set of needs related to scientific uncertainty, measurement, and monitoring; mechanisms to drive landowner adoption at large scale; and public funding. If these needs can be addressed, the potential scale of deployment in the United States is likely on the order of hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 (MtCO2 ) per year.