UN Says Carbon Removal Is Essential, but Who Foots the Bill?

The United Nations has officially put carbon removal on the climate agenda. The UN Environment Programme's 141-page "Limiting Overshoot" report, released in September 2026, is the first major UN climate review to assume the world will breach 1.5 degrees of warming and then lay out a path back. According to Bloomberg's reporting on the report, industry proponents and project developers read it as the UN's first official acknowledgement that drawing down CO2 is now unavoidable. But as leaders gathered in New York for the UN General Assembly and the annual Climate Week NYC, one question went unanswered: who pays for the removal?

The bill no one volunteered for

Carbon removal does not pay for itself. That is the blunt assessment of Adair Turner, co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, a coalition of executives from companies including ArcelorMittal, HSBC and Shell. "When you get to removals, it's never gonna be a win-win," Turner said in an interview. "You're doing it to take emissions out, and so somebody has got to pay." Unlike electric cars or solar panels, carbon removal offers no consumer market and no cost savings to offset the price. An Energy Transitions Commission report found that scaling up carbon dioxide removal is one of four major environmental ambitions now falling short, in a world that keeps blowing past its targets for limiting temperature rise.

The math behind the panic

The numbers in the UN report explain the urgency. The planet is already 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Even under the most optimistic scenario, full implementation of every national climate pledge, temperatures are projected to peak at 1.8 degrees. Under current policies, warming could reach 2.6 degrees by the end of the century. The remaining carbon budget is about one hundred thirty billion tonnes of CO2, which would be spent in roughly three years at today's emission rate of around forty billion tonnes a year. After that, every year of overshoot has to be undone by carbon removal, which the report calls the engine of "overshoot, peak, and decline": temperatures rise past 1.5 degrees, then emissions cuts plus carbon dioxide removal pull them back down.

One buyer, most of the market

For now, the money comes from a narrow pool of companies buying carbon removal credits toward voluntary net-zero pledges, not from any legal requirement. According to market tracker CDR.fyi, Microsoft represented roughly 90 percent of global carbon removal purchases in 2025 and contracted more than forty-five million tonnes of removal that year, nine times its 2023 volume. The next largest buyer, the Frontier coalition backed by Meta and Google, had contracted about one point eight million tonnes to date. In April, Bloomberg and Heatmap reported that Microsoft had told suppliers it was pausing new purchases.

Microsoft's chief sustainability officer, Melanie Nakagawa, later said the program "has not ended," and that the company adjusts the pace and volume of procurement. The episode still rattled the sector: the Clean Air Task Force wrote in June that voluntary markets alone could never deliver the gigatons of removal scientists say the world needs.

The clock matters as much as the invoice

The UN said earlier this month that the world will likely surpass the Paris goal of holding warming to 1.5 degrees within the next few years, and carbon dioxide emissions are set to reach a new high this year. Every additional tonne emitted now is a tonne that will eventually need expensive carbon removal to take back out. Until governments or markets decide who foots the bill, the technology the UN now calls necessary stays stuck in a market that runs mostly on one company's goodwill.

The stakes are clearest in the words of one of the report's own co-authors. "We cannot rely on CDR as a get-out-of-jail-free card," said Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter and the UK Met Office. "We have to reduce emissions with even more urgency than before." Carbon removal can undo overshoot only after the world stops adding to it.