The leading provider of financial services is the most recent of several international businesses to reach a long-term deal with a pioneer in Swiss direct air capture

The investment bank UBS today announced it has signed a 10-year agreement with Swiss direct air capture (DAC) specialist Climeworks, making it the first financial services company to do so. The agreement will help offset UBS’ “unavoidable” emissions and support the growth of the nascent carbon removals sector. Additionally, UBS announced that it was collaborating with Neustark, a Swiss company that produces zero-emissions concrete and removes CO2 from the atmosphere by storing it in concrete, as another way to address its “unavoidable carbon emissions. The shift to a low-carbon economy is aided by innovative technology, according to Suni Hartford, executive board lead for sustainability at UBS. By working with neustark and Climeworks, UBS hopes to both significantly decrease its carbon footprint and, more importantly, to aid in the creation of the scaleable solutions required for the world to reach net-zero emissions by the year 2050. By 2050, between three billion and twelve billion tonnes of CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere annually to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. DAC technology is anticipated to play a key role in this effort, with the potential to remove up to 310 billion tons of CO2 by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climeworks has referred to the new long-term arrangement as “essential” to supplying it with the money it needs to hasten the deployment of its next generation of carbon removal units. By reacting the collected gas with a rock to achieve permanent sequestration, the business runs a small-scale DAC system in Iceland called the Orca plant that takes CO2 from the air and then stores it under the Icelandic bedrock. To capitalize on the long-term need for CO2 removal solutions, Climeworks also recently announced that it has started construction of its second facility, Mammoth. The ability of the sector to reduce emissions at a rate, scale, and price that will support the achievement of net zero emissions goals is still being questioned by some environmental groups, and other groups are concerned that the technology may divert attention from the need to reduce emissions at their source. However, proponents of negative emissions projects contend that the young industry might assist reduce emissions that are expensive or impossible to avoid and still play a crucial part in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.