Prof. Dr. Wilfried Rickels

Strategies for the Evaluation and Assessment of Ocean based Carbon Dioxide Removal

Bridging current knowledge gaps to enable the UPTAKE of carbon dioxide removal methods

The KlimaF-I project analyses the importance of research and innovation (R&I) measures for achieving climate policy goals. Both the scientific and the application-related political perspectives are taken into account. The aim of the project is to gain a profound understanding of the significance of R&I measures for the achievement of climate policy goals, regarding systemic and cross-measure effects. The focus of the project is on German climate policy, which interacts closely with European climate policy.

A new four-year Horizon Europe project has been initiated to investigate the feasibility of storing CO2 in the ocean. It aims to determine whether this method is environmentally safe, socially acceptable, and economically viable. The oceans hold significant potential as enhanced sinks for atmospheric CO2, contributing to global climate targets. Within the project, the Kiel Institute will address the question of how actual CDR (carbon dioxide removal)-based methods could be implemented and integrated into climate policy.

In cooperation of the Christian-Albrechts-University (CAU) and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Wilfried Rickels takes up a professorship to research economic aspects of atmospheric CO2 removal (Economics of Negative Emissions Technologies). In this capacity, he will also remain director of the Global Commons and Climate Policy Research Center at the Kiel Institute.

Coastal ecosystems such as seagrass meadows, salt marshes and mangrove forests are valuable to humans in many ways. In particular, they store carbon - and do so with a much higher surface density than forests, for example. They thus make an important contribution to mitigating climate change. Australia's coastal ecosystems alone, which absorb a particularly large amount of CO2 from the atmosphere, save the rest of the world climate-related costs of around 23 billion US dollar a year. This is according to calculations just published by researchers at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), GEOMAR Helmholtz-Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel University (CAU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).