Towards a Just Implementation of Carbon Dioxide Removal

Elisa Paiusco will defend her dissertation called Towards a Just Implementation of Carbon Dioxide Removal: A Capabilities Approach at 18 September 2026 12:30-14:00 at Waaier, 4 at the University of Twente. 

More details and the link to the livestream can be found here. 

Description
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) comprises an array of techniques that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and durably store it. Despite widespread consensus on the need for CDR to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, important questions remain regarding the ethical permissibility of deploying these techniques at scale. How should climate justice be conceptualised in the governance and implementation of CDR? This dissertation examines the potential injustices associated with the prospective deployment of CDR techniques. Particular attention is given to three interconnected concerns: the intergenerational imposition of risk, the displacement of unjust harms onto economically developing nations, and the moral significance of nonhuman nature in CDR governance. This dissertation argues that climate justice must be understood as multi-dimensional, both in terms of the dimensions of well-being it recognises and the dimensions of justice it incorporates–namely, distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice. Conceptualising climate justice in this way allows for a more adequate account of the complex ethical landscape within which CDR is likely to operate. Building on this premise, the dissertation develops a contextual procedural capabilities approach to evaluate the ethical permissibility of CDR deployment. This framework provides a normative basis for assessing the fair implementation of CDR under conditions of value pluralism and uncertainty. The analysis demonstrates that CDR cannot be assessed in isolation from broader questions of justice, including who counts as a subject of justice and how processes of contextual deliberation should be structured. The dissertation argues that legitimate governance of CDR depends on participatory and deliberative processes through which relevant capabilities can be identified contextually and evaluated in relation to broader goals of sustainable development.