 Great. So, as part of the climate recon project, we also wanted to look at the LTSs across the whole of the EU on a specific topic. And I know the Wyzyropa have done this already for the gas, for the gas, natural gas. And we decided to look at basically the carbon sinks that, or what countries are saying about carbon sinks from both the natural and artificial perspective, because as we know, to reach climate neutrality you, or it's essentially impossible to reduce some emissions and so you need to have some sense of negative emissions that can act to counteract the emissions that you do have. And this can be in two ways. It can be even natural sinks, so lulusef essentially, and then also within the last, I don't know, decade or so, people have been talking more and more about technological removals in the form of carbon capture and storage or direct air capture, this kind of thing. So we kind of wanted to look at both of them and how they were incorporated in the different strategies. And when I was researching this, I found that there was a report actually in 2021 that I think the EU commissioned, which was looking across the whole region at different scientific publications and seeing what kind of the storage rates and the sequestration rates were from different kinds of land types. And we see what I think kind of probably people know or least suspect is that forests generally have very high sequestration rates and wetlands have very high carbon stock rates but a bit lower sequestration rates. But there is quite a high heterogeneity across different regions and across different studies so not all forests are the same for instance and it's not just the case that you can have really high sequestration if you have lots of forests. And yeah, this kind of is summarised or what they found also is summarised here that generally with... I don't know if I need the speaker to... Generally with forests or trees then faster growing species absorb more carbon and this is in fact something that I think it was published last year or the year before in Nature Climate Change that trees are tending to absorb carbon quicker because of this CO2 fertilisation because there's more in the atmosphere but then as a consequence of that they're also dying quicker so the long-term sink effects are not maybe as pronounced as we could have hoped for and in order to store carbon from faster growing species for a long time then sustainable wood use in long-lived products is maybe the way that you can do that but when it comes to storing carbon in forests for a long time then the studies tend to show that unmanaged forests that store carbon slowly generally keep it for a longer time and what the studies also show with wetlands is that you can restore wetlands but it takes quite a long time for the carbon to replenish so in that sense it's much better to conserve what you have then lose it and then restore it again and in the context of lulloseff and natural sinks at the EU level I'll go very quickly for this because of time shortages we find that emissions kind of removals cover about 10% of total emissions and of course for this to reach carbon neutrality, a climate neutrality will have to be 100% so there's quite a long way to go and when we look at the lulloseff sector in particular we find that it has been decreasing since around 2009 and indeed it is projected to kind of stay the same or even decrease slightly in the near future and that nearly all of the sequestration is basically from forests you can see that the rate of absorption really accurately is kind of tracking the rate of absorption in forests and if you take that away you kind of have net emissions from all of the sub-sexes apart from harvested wood products and this is just to show that there's something of a correlation between the absorption in forests and the absorption in lulloseff sectors but going beyond that we can also say that not all forests are the same because you can look at the case of Estonia which has had a really high land area of forests but is now a net emitter in the lulloseff sector and then also we can look at what the 555 targets say in terms of sequestration so it should be increased up to 2030 to 310 megatons of CO2 and this is also a country level I just put them all on a graph there what the different countries have been told to achieve within this and also by 2035 the combined land sector, lulloseff and agriculture should be climate neutral and then also one thing that we found is that the EU reference scenarios now have projections for lulloseff and this is quite interesting because we can see when we compare these to the actual emissions from 2020 for the decades that followed there are certain sinks that are projected to increase a lot so for instance Germany and others that are predicted to stay roughly the same so Sweden I think Spain also but then there are also some that are under the EU reference scenario is not really projected to increase at all and in fact if you look at Estonia it's still actually projected to be a net emitter by 2050 and when it comes to technological sinks we kind of define two different types so you can think of it conceptually that there are forms of carbon captured that are there that they inherently remove carbon from the atmosphere that's things like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and direct air capture but then there are also ones which are simply reducing the amount of emissions that might be caused by something so that's classic carbon capture and storage it comes from a point source where you can remove emissions from say natural gas but that's never going to be 100% effective so we're talking about removals but it's kind of removals in an artificial sense because it's not actually removing anything from the atmosphere it's emitting things to the atmosphere just less that would be emitted if you didn't have CCS and when you look kind of at both of these in terms of what the EU has said you find that all of the 1.5 scenarios that they published in this Clean Planet for All document include both types of technological sinks to quite a high extent so 500 megatons of CO2 should be captured or stored in 2050 for a 1.5 degree warming scenario so climate neutrality by 2050 that was just a bit of background so then to look at natural carbon sinks in the long term strategies the first thing we wanted to kind of do is to understand based on the targets that countries have given so they've said that they want to have climate neutrality but they've also quite often had to have a real or implied target for the amount of emissions, direct emissions, reductions they want to do so that might be a level of 85% or 90% and then implicit to that is then that they then need natural sinks to account for say 10% of their emissions so what we tried to do is see if we can estimate what the minimum sink sizes are for each country in the EU that has submitted a long term strategy and also the ones that haven't in fact so we did that kind of in a standardised way as we could we basically took the value if they were specifying it which was not super often based on the most ambitious climate neutrality modelling scenario that they would give if they didn't do that then we would take what their reduction target was excluding Lulusef and take what is left as the Lulusef sink so quite often they might say we want to achieve climate neutrality but we also want to reduce emissions by 90% in other sectors so then you know that carbon sinks should account for 10% and if they were less ambitious than climate neutrality then we would just add on the extra emissions so if they said they wanted to reduce emissions including Lulusef by 90% then we would add the 10% of emissions on if they didn't give any targets at all then we wanted to still say something about those countries and then we found that the average kind of reductions that country were talking about was 85% so that's what we used kind of for those countries like if they were to follow what other countries are doing and reduce their emissions by 85% then there the sinks that they would need would be 15% so then we can at least say something about them and for a few countries that were really comprehensive in their LTSs they would also say the level of technological removal so for instance Hungary did this and we didn't really we wanted to talk about what the size of the sink they would need anyway so if they gave us that value then we would add it back on and the other thing to say is there are many uncertainties in this the EU reference scenarios I think and maybe not the best thing to use as the projections of the sinks in 2050 but the reason we did is because it establishes a baseline for every country it's the same methodology for every country so what I'm going to show is not necessarily super accurate but it at least provides kind of a baseline or some sort of idea of where countries stand on this and here I've just listed what the targets that we used for every country were in terms of what their reductions were so you can see for the Baltic states they're in red and you can see that it is pretty often the case that it's around 85% when we're looking at the targets or the modelling and some are more ambitious like Germany had a range of 80s to 95% which is really really big and we took the most ambitious in that case and when we did this we can see that we can compare what the projected Lulus Ffsink is from the EU reference scenarios against what the minimum requirements would be for that country and we can present this in a bar chart which just shows the two bars or we can present it as a ratio for some countries the projected Lulus Ffsink is going to be positive in 2050 so then instead of doing a ratio we use the magnitude of the difference between the two sinks and then use that as the numerator in the ratio and you can see that there's really really big differences between different countries so Sweden and Finland the projected Lulus Ffsink is going to be bigger than what they require for climate neutrality but on the other hand you have Estonia which is really really far away because the sink is projected to be a net emitter still in 2050 and we took the assumption that they were going to reduce emissions by 85% so then that leaves 15% of emissions in 1990 that have to be compensated and that's really far away if your sink is going to be positive and then we could kind of group countries into three different categories so the on track ones are the ones where the size of the projected sink is bigger than what they would need to do to achieve climate neutrality and there are only three countries that fall into that category and one of them Spain has specifically said that they need to use carbon capture and storage so if you're looking purely at natural sinks there are only two countries that are going to based on this very very simple analysis be able to do that based on their projected sinks in 2050 then we have a lot of countries kind of where the sink projected size is within a factor of two of what the sink they would need to have in 2050 is so Lithuania is in this category and we put this category there because we know that this projection of climate natural sinks under a baseline scenario is really really variable so I think the uncertainty of factor of two is not so big but then there are these countries a huge group of countries whose projected sink in 2050 is more than a factor of two smaller than what they would need to reach climate neutrality under their targets or models and Latvia and Nistonia in that category yeah so I kind of put these together and of the countries that are really far away you can kind of think of them as in three different categories you have small densely populated countries like Malta and Belgium who say in their long term strategies that they don't have much room for a forestation and it's really difficult to know how countries like that are going to reach climate neutrality unless they use technological solutions because they don't really have much option to increase their natural sinks but then at the same time they're still saying that they're going to have outstanding emissions of 10 or 5 or 15 or 20% in 2050 then you have countries like Estonia and Latvia who have more potential I would say to increase the size of their carbon sinks because they have lots of forested land, their population densities are a little bit lower but their sinks are projected to go the wrong way so it's more there's more potential there and then you also have countries in a third category like the Republic of Ireland or Denmark whose sinks have essentially since 1990 always been positive and again within their borders if they're targeting a reduction of 85% say in emissions by 2050 it's really difficult to understand how they are going to again reach climate neutrality without relying quite significantly on technological solutions and then having done that looked more at what they are actually saying in terms of the Luluseff sectors so kind of you could group how they've incorporated this into three different groups so you have countries that are talking about Luluseff as a separate sector which is the majority, you have a few countries that have integrated it with agriculture and a few countries that are not talking about it at all so the three that I found were Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands, they don't talk about Luluseff at all and then you can also talk about some of the common aspects that they were talking about so I think I've probably missed some but essentially nearly every country aside from the ones that said they didn't have the space to do it are talking about aforestation or reforestation quite a lot of them are talking about land planning and the reason for this is because I think estimating emissions in the Luluseff sector is really the hardest so this was also a common theme that we saw quite a lot that countries want to improve them sort of capacity to understand what kind of emissions they have from specific regions inside the Luluseff sector so this is a common theme that we saw and then to look more specifically at forestry like I said nearly all countries call for improved forest management or sustainable forestry but specifics are often lacking behind then and a couple of countries call into question this idea of the stability of their forests long term so on the right is some modelling from the Austrian LTS so I think it's a good idea and I think it's a good idea on the right is some modelling from the Austrian LTS based on five different scenarios which look at different kind of wood use like really exploiting wood really really extensively in the country or the green curve at the bottom is not exploiting it very much at all and what they found is that by 2100 even when they're not really exploiting and this is specific to Austria of course not really exploiting wood at all the size of their sink is still going to decrease and become almost zero by 2100 so there's also this question I think in terms of how long term any sink can be depending on the circumstances of a specific country and what the sector is like there and whether it is instead just kind of like a debit for the future that the emissions are being removed for a period of time but not indefinitely and linked into that is this idea of adaptation because the Luluseff sector is one that is going to be really affected by changing climate and in fact a lot of cases this might lead to a weakening of sink sizes so for instance in Portugal and Spain they both talk quite a lot about trying to find ways to manage the risks of forest fires or countries such as I think Luxembourg spent a long time talking about trying to reduce spark beetle infestations because these are kind of climate change factors which are going to really weaken the strength, the size of their sinks and I just pick out a few different examples based on this here but I think for brevity we should go a bit faster. In terms of other land use categories, yeah a lot of countries talking about restoring and protecting peatlands and wetlands and some countries also talk about storing of carbon and agricultural soils which is another thing to kind of draw out in this analysis that we found is that it's really difficult to draw this boundary around Luluseff because it has so many intersections of so many other sectors like with the agriculture sector and then issues to do with kind of how much wood you're using like biore sources and then if you have an expanding population you have this issue of pressure coming from urbanisation say so yeah it's something that's really complicated and then as part of that we wanted to look kind of more specifically at the area of biore sources and what countries are saying about how much they want to exploit kind of these in terms of traditional materials so sort of wood for energy or wood for construction but then also sometimes they're talking about kind of new materials so kind of this more let's say high tech uses where you can use sort of the biopolymers as the building blocks for replacement of materials that are derived from fossil fuels like this bioplastics kind of sector yeah and Greece is the one country that clearly states that developing the bioeconomy is a priority but almost all countries also talk about the increasing use of biore sources to different extents and this is something else that's really important because it's something that could in principle also put pressure on the size of the expected carbon sinks of these countries if it's not done in a strategic way Italy puts emphasis on regenerative bioeconomy so the regeneration of soils CO2 in the atmosphere a lot of countries are talking about the hierarchy of sustainability but not all of them so this is the idea that it's better to first use wood in long lived products because simply put you are then keeping the carbon locked up for a longer time and this was talked about by France, Belgium, Germany, Croatia Czech Republic and Luxembourg and France was one country which really kind of called into question the stability of their carbon sink in forests long term and they said that in order to manage this they need to triple the production of these products between 2015 and 2050 on the other hand Greece was a country that we really noticed is really really talking about the use of biore sources for energy production I think they stipulate how much land use they want to use for this and if you compare that to the land area of Greece it's something like 4 or 5% which is really a lot because land use is a zero sum game and if you want to use land for something else, for something you can't use it for anything else really use of biomass and district heating is also predicted to increase but the use by private households is going to decrease and that's because of a lot of the negative air pollution impacts that we know about a lot of countries also talk about the transport sector and kind of bio energy is being a key possibility for decarbonising transport sectors that are difficult to decarbonising of ways like aviation and shipping and then to come on to the conflicts developing of the bio economy does often result in greater land use and then that land can't be used for anything else so the Czech Republic says that there is potential for 680,000 hectares of arable land and 400,000 hectares of permanent grassland for biomass Denmark plans to simultaneously increase the share of forests and bio energy based electricity production and Italy says they want to fully exploit the potential of biomass while emphasising the importance of sustainable forest management so they kind of quite a lot of these conflicts in the strategies which might cause problems in the future if they want to on the one hand increase these of bioresources and on the other hand maintain the size of the carbon sink of course these things don't necessarily have to be contradictory but they can be contradictory I think and then we also looked at the technological carbon sinks and the national long-term strategies which are included in a few strategies to quite a great extent and others not so much so so this map I showed is basically our assessment of how promising or otherwise countries see carbon capture and storage and carbon capture and utilisation and you can see actually I think half or just over half of the countries are either stating directly or implicitly stating that they would like to use these technologies or develop an infrastructure by which they could use them and then you have other countries which are not stating that but are stating it a bit more ambiguously like they would potentially like to use them but they're not sure and then in terms of countries that are quite strongly against a few of them that we could pick out so Latvia say in their strategy that they don't say directly that they don't want to use these technologies but they say that there's no capacity for carbon storage in Latvia in a cost effective manner so based on no additional information we concluded that they're not planning on using it and Portugal I think are another country that came out really really strongly against the use of CCS and CCU and when we look at the industry that countries are talking about using this for mainly cement and steel which is obvious these are very difficult things to decarbonise and then I've just highlighted again what a few different countries are saying about this so Hungary is quite pro CCS and they actually included in both of their neutrality scenarios a high use of CCS post 20 mainly post 2040 but a little bit in 2040 to reduce by 10 megatons carbon that would be emitted and they actually also specify which different sectors they were going to use that for and to some extent they specify what they will use the captured carbon for like we've talked about the Hungarian strategy it's actually really comprehensive Portugal on the other hand also spent quite a lot of time talking about these technologies but they're quite strongly against it because they don't see it as very cost effective and the only sector that they could see it being used for in their country is cement but they think that by 2050 the cement sector would have changed so much anyway that the impact of it won't be very low finally France talk about using it a lot for storage rather than utilisation and they give specific values for the storage that they can use which I talk about in the next slide that a lot of countries are talking about wanting to use these technologies but they are not sure yet or haven't done the analysis as to what the capacity they will have in their country is they were only as far as I could tell free explicit values from countries where they stated this is what we think our capacity for carbon storage is and that was Austria, France and Greece but 10 of the 20 countries nonetheless viewed these technologies as positive in our assessment and then to move to diffuse removals bioenergy and carbon capture and storage is included much more often than direct air capture we didn't really even find any mentions to any of the other removal technologies but the amount of information is generally much lower than it is for CCS and CCU so Finland and France both included quantitative values for BEX that they want to remove or would potentially do in the Finnish case because it was included in one of their two climate neutrality scenarios whereas the if one didn't use it but it was included much less than CCS and CCU so it's interesting that countries are looking at techniques that will allow them to continue to use fossil fuels but reduce their impact rather than techniques that might help to remove further carbon from the atmosphere and with direct air capture it was included very rarely and the government said that it will be necessary and the amount that they as a country will have to remove should be determined on a global level and then there were a few of references to this but that was all and a final thing I wanted to mention is that no country talked about sequestration from marine environments at all despite the fact that this can in some cases be quite significant based on the same EU report the levels of sequestration and the carbon stocks are not always so small so it's something else I don't know if it's classically even covered by Luluseff or not but it's something else that countries could in the future talk about so to conclude we did a very simple analysis of the rejected sink size based on EU reference scenarios against what countries are stating is necessary for climate neutrality and based on this very simple analysis I think there are quite a lot of problems with these EU reference scenarios for 2050 but very few countries are on track to have a sufficient sink to reach climate neutrality by 2050 for some countries I think particularly Malta but there are other countries it's really difficult to know how they can achieve territorial climate neutrality because of the specific circumstances of that country where countries are talking about measures to increase their carbon sinks then of course they're talking about afforestation often few countries actually give specific details of how much or what they're trying to do but they all talk about it quite a lot but a few also highlight the instability of the carbon sink due to natural changes and those effect that come about because of changes to the climate most countries at the same time are talking about this are also talking about wanting to exploit buyer resources and use the buyer economy more and this is done for quite a lot of countries through this hierarchy of use where it's first used in long live products so in construction for instance where the carbon is locked up for a long term but a few are also talking about using it from a bioenergy perspective and the replacement of fossil fuels in that way more than half of countries to look at technological sinks are talking about using CCS and CCU and this is included much more than countries talking about the direct removal of emissions through BEX or DAC but one thing that I would finally highlight there is that countries don't always make this distinction clear sometimes they talk about CCS and then you find later in the document that it's coming from from wood so it's really BEX and I think countries can make this distinction clear because in terms of like on a conceptual level they're actually really different I think because one is leading to increase the emissions just less than there would be otherwise whereas the other is despite I think kind of the well-known criticisms of it in terms of land use is actually avoiding emissions so yeah that's why I should also say that this analysis has not finished we still have a little bit of work to do to finish that this is kind of an intermediate series of conclusions but yeah that is what we found