Ringsby et al. (2026): Closing the carbon removal attribution gap requires an objective atmospheric basis
Alexandra Ringsby, Marc Roston, Gian Mallarino, Mislav Radic, Kate Maher, IN: CDRXiv, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18510380
Efforts to integrate carbon dioxide removal (CDR) into climate policy, markets, and inventories are advancing rapidly, but without a unified accounting logic to attribute atmospheric impacts. Existing crediting approaches omit upstream emissions, creating a structural “attribution gap” in which removals are credited even as associated emissions remain in the atmosphere. Although it remains small today, the authors find that this gap could reach gigaton-scale annually in biomass-based CDR systems. To address this discrepancy, the authors propose an Objective Atmospheric Basis (OAB): a technology-agnostic accounting framework that tracks carbon transfers explicitly using mass-balance ledger that casts emissions as persistent liabilities and removals as assets.