Humanity has a long track record of making big changes with little forethought. From fossil fuels to AI, plastics to pesticides, we love innovating away our problems, only to find we’ve created different ones. So it can be refreshing to hear about cases where we’ve taken a step back to deliberate before committing to a drastic new idea, like carbon dioxide removal.

With carbon emissions continuing to climb, many scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers have advocated taking action to directly remove carbon from the atmosphere. They argue that these geoengineering approaches are necessary to avoid catastrophic changes to our land, air and sea.