Marine carbon dioxide removal risks reproducing global inequalities unless ocean governance places equity, participation and accountability at its core
This piece is part of the series 'Governing the Oceans: Rethinking Access and Equity'
The ocean plays a fundamental role in regulating the global climate by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yet climate change is simultaneously transforming marine ecosystems through ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation and sea-level rise. Since records began in the 1970s, the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by climate change, while the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled since the early 1990s. At the same time, projections indicate that the pH of the open ocean surface could decline by up to 0.3 pH units by 2100 due to ongoing ocean acidification, severely threatening marine ecosystems and species that depend on stable ocean chemistry, such as coral reefs. As these pressures intensify, interest in enhancing the ocean’s capacity to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide through marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) is growing among scientific institutions, governments and private actors in support of keeping global climate targets within reach.
Widely understood as a set of approaches intended to enhance the ocean’s capacity to sequester and store carbon dioxide, mCDR is increasingly discussed in the context of residual emissions and net-negative pathways. In addition to enhancing coastal and marine ecosystems with carbon-storing properties, such as mangroves or seagrass meadows, proposed approaches include ocean alkalinity enhancement, large-scale sinking of carbon-rich biomass and artificial upwelling to modify carbon uptake processes. While these approaches differ significantly in scale, mechanisms and permanence, they share the common characteristic of deliberately altering ocean conditions with the aim of increasing long-term carbon storage in the ocean.
While the primary intent of mCDR is, or should be, to support global climate goals, governing these approaches requires addressing the underlying complexity of deliberate intervention in the marine environment. Adding a novel activity to an already stressed ocean space brings significant challenges. While mCDR approaches may contribute to climate goals and even produce localised environmental co-benefits, such as partially counteracting ocean acidification, they may simultaneously introduce additional ecological and social risks. For example, approaches involving nutrient addition or biomass sinking may alter marine food webs, oxygen dynamics and ecosystem functioning, with potential consequences for fisheries and coastal livelihoods.
Decision-making around mCDR is therefore not only technical in nature, focused on reducing and managing environmental risk, but also raises fundamental environmental justice questions.
At the same time, ocean governance remains highly fragmented across institutions, sectors and jurisdictions, making it difficult to address the multifaceted nature of mCDR. Because ocean systems are deeply interconnected and marine ecosystems transcend political boundaries, mCDR governance must consider transboundary impacts and ecosystem connectivity. Deliberate interventions in one location may produce ecological effects beyond the site of deployment, while monitoring and attribution in the marine environment remain inherently challenging. Moreover, scientific understanding of large-scale mCDR deployment is still limited. Many long-term ecological and social consequences will only become visible through deployment itself, meaning that decisions about whether, where and to what extent mCDR should proceed are being made under conditions of deep uncertainty. Governing mCDR therefore requires navigating the difficult tension of pursuing novel responses to the escalating harms of climate change and recognising that these interventions may themselves reshape marine environments and human-ocean relations in uncertain and uneven ways.
Decision-making around mCDR is therefore not only technical in nature, focused on reducing and managing environmental risk, but also raises fundamental environmental justice questions: Who makes the decisions about mCDR? Who participates in governance processes? How are risks, benefits and responsibilities distributed? One central challenge concerns distribution. The financial, scientific and technological capacities required to research and develop mCDR are currently concentrated primarily in North America and Europe, where many leading research initiatives, start-ups and private investments are located. As a result, some states and actors are significantly better positioned than others to shape emerging technologies and governance agendas. Many inequalities surrounding mCDR are therefore already being structured before formal governance arrangements are fully developed.
Formal international governance processes may be open in principle, yet meaningful participation often depends on access to scientific expertise, financial resources, institutional capacity and diplomatic presence. Consequently, communities and states most directly connected to marine environments, and often most vulnerable to climate change, may have limited influence over decisions surrounding emerging ocean interventions. At the same time, large-scale future deployment of mCDR may be justified through its potential contribution to long-term climate stabilisation and the protection of future generations from escalating climate harms. Yet future generations may also inherit the ecological consequences, governance burdens and technological dependencies associated with deliberate ocean intervention.
Formal international governance processes may be open in principle, yet meaningful participation often depends on access to scientific expertise, financial resources, institutional capacity and diplomatic presence.
The complex character of mCDR poses a fundamental challenge for international ocean governance. Existing governance frameworks, particularly the London Convention and Protocol (LC/LP), approach mCDR primarily through the lens of pollution prevention and environmental risk assessment. This framing has provided an important institutional foundation for precautionary oversight and international scrutiny. However, it also translates the complexity of mCDR into familiar technocratic categories centred on measurable environmental impacts. Existing ocean governance institutions were largely designed to regulate sectoral activities or prevent harm, rather than govern deliberate interventions intended to reshape Earth systems. In practice, governance becomes primarily focused on identifying, quantifying and managing environmental risk, which is central but incomplete. The governance challenges associated with mCDR are therefore not only environmental and technological, but also deeply social and political. Questions of equity emerge across all stages of mCDR research, development and potential deployment.
At the same time, the emergence of mCDR governance presents an opportunity. Marine CDR sits at the intersection of climate change, ocean governance and global inequality, thereby creating space to deliberate how emerging ocean activities are governed. This does not require abandoning existing governance frameworks, which continue to provide essential foundations for precaution, oversight and international coordination. However, it does require expanding governance approaches beyond narrow environmental risk assessment and strengthening connections between existing governance frameworks. Linking the London Convention and Protocol with broader ocean and biodiversity governance processes, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the new Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, may help address governance gaps, particularly in relation to environmental justice.
Governance must therefore engage with questions of environmental safety and technical feasibility, as well as with who defines acceptable risk, whose knowledge informs governance, who benefits from intervention and who bears potential burdens and uncertainties.
Equitable governance of mCDR requires recognising that deliberate ocean interventions inevitably interact with broader social relations and societal goals. Governance must therefore engage with questions of environmental safety and technical feasibility, as well as with who defines acceptable risk, whose knowledge informs governance, who benefits from intervention and who bears potential burdens and uncertainties. This is particularly important under conditions of deep uncertainty, where many ecological and social consequences may only become visible over time. Governance processes must therefore be capable of integrating ecological, technological and social dimensions simultaneously, rather than treating equity as secondary to environmental assessment.
Ultimately, debates over mCDR are also debates about the future of the ocean and who gets to shape it. As ocean-based climate interventions potentially move from scientific research toward political and economic reality, equitable governance of mCDR will depend on robustly managing environmental risk as well as ensuring that questions of participation, distribution and responsibility remain central from the outset. In an ocean already marked by accelerating climate pressures and uneven distributions of power and capacity, the pursuit of climate solutions should not come at the expense of reinforcing existing inequalities.
Lina Röschel is a Research Associate with the Ocean Governance Research Group at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) at GFZ in Potsdam, Germany.
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Lina Röschel is a research associate with the Ocean Governance Research Group at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) at GFZ in Potsdam, Germany. Her ...
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