UPTAKE aims to facilitate the sustainable upscaling of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods by developing a set of robust strategies through technical, theoretical, and practical analysis accompanied by interactive dialogue within a CDR stakeholder forum. As a result, UPTAKE will develop a harmonised, comprehensive, inclusive, integrated, and transparent CDR knowledge inventory to evaluate a wide range of CDR technologies and methods, quantifying their national, European, and global costs, effectiveness, and removal potential as well as risks, constraints, and side-effects at different scales, and their prospects of technological progress. The UPTAKE approach will allow the assessment of geographical, sectoral, socioeconomic, demographic, and temporal trade-offs, co-benefits, and opportunities emerging from portfolios of different CDR methods. The enhanced socio-technical understanding of CDR methods will feed into an ensemble of state-of-the-art integrated assessment models (IAMs), which will help improve the integration of CDR methods given the EU policy objectives set for 2030, 2050, and beyond climate neutrality. UPTAKE will assess CDR governance and policy frameworks considering social acceptance, accountability, monitoring, and regulations for sustainable CDR rollout at scale. As a result, UPTAKE will generate an open and interactive CDR roadmap explorer to investigate strategies that are resilient to risks of failure and disruption, and minimise adverse impacts on society, economy, and the environment, aiming for a just, inclusive, and sustainable transition.

CMCC Scientific leader is Soheil Shayegh.

General Objectives

UPTAKE aims to develop resilient CDR strategies based on strengthened scientific evidence on the social, technological, economic, and environmental characteristics of CDR technologies and their interplay. The scientific evidence will be collated into a CDR knowledge inventory, openly accessible to the science, policy, business communities. Together with improved CDR modules in climate-energy models, a CDR roadmap explorer will be developed to help identify resilient and implementable CDR portfolios which enable net-zero strategies.

Expected Results

UPTAKE will advance the understanding of the potential role of CDR in achieving European and global climate policy goals. The unique composition of the UPTAKE team and the wide range of methods and tools proposed by the team from engineering to climate-economic modelling, to political science and SSH assessment provide an opportunity to investigate the CDR question in depth and from a multifaceted, trans-disciplinary perspective.

As a result, UPTAKE aims at:

1. Providing, for the first time, a harmonised, comprehensive, integrated, and transparent CDR knowledge inventory of carbon removal methods and their comparative assessment going beyond the current technoeconomic analysis by including their broader environmental, life cycle, economic, social, political and governance implications, and ripple effects, as well as their role in an overall carbon mitigation
   portfolio.
2. Advancing leading energy, Integrated Assessment, and climate models by incorporating a detailed representation of various CDR methods, including geographical, sectoral, socioeconomic, demographic, and temporal heterogeneity, as well as focusing on their synergies and trade-offs.
3. Designing a governance framework for upscaling CDR methods from idea to practice, including policy measures, business models, ethical, legal, financial, social aspects, as well as MRV considerations.
4. Developing an interactive CDR roadmap explorer to provide a systemic view of just, resilient, and implementable CDR strategies at national, European, and global levels, accounting for the infrastructure requirements.
5. Promoting open research and fostering transparency about CDR methods by creating a FAIR ecosystem for open datasets and modules/software used by climate models and IAMs developed in UPTAKE.
6. Creating an open CDR stakeholder forum to gather all relevant stakeholders and actors and provide open access to research inventories, methods, and models used in UPTAKE.