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This submit was co-written by Livia Duprez.
As we’ve beforehand written, carbon dioxide elimination (CDR) is a key requirement for us to achieve the 1.5 diploma goal by 2050, with the IPCC claiming that every one roads result in CDR.
As we’ve regarded deeper into the CDR sector, now we have recognized the essential function of academia in spearheading catalytic analysis into the area – each when it comes to the theoretical underpinnings of assorted applied sciences, and when it comes to appearing as an incubator for early-stage concepts.
Subsequently, we thought it will be informative to supply a rating for universities which might be probably the most concerned in CDR. The goal is to assist numerous actors within the area higher perceive which educational establishments are on the vanguard of CDR analysis and improvement.
Earlier than delving deeper into the methodology, we wished to caveat the rankings by saying the methodology is a piece in progress, and because the business develops, so will our methodology. In different phrases – suggestions may be very a lot welcome!
Collating the preliminary pool of universities to rank
The preliminary pool of universities that have been considered have been collated by way of a mix of two strategies, a prime down strategy and backside up strategy. The highest down strategy concerned desk analysis on what universities’ engagement with CDR has been, whereas the underside up strategy concerned quantifying the analysis outputs of assorted educational establishments.
Extra particularly, the prime down strategy concerned parsing by way of the highest 100 universities from the QS rankings and categorising whether or not they’re pursuing CDR analysis at scale by way of an initiative, division or analysis group.
The frequent pattern of universities was that they’ve three forms of departmental association when creating CDR in universities:
- First is an unfocused analysis centre. Many vitality and atmosphere departments, for instance, have some advert hoc analysis on Carbon Seize and Storage or vitality coverage and maybe a numerical mannequin on engineering of CDR applied sciences. That is the minimal requirement for a college to be on our CDR checklist.
- Second is CDR-specific college partnership corresponding to CO2RE, an initiative that joins seven UK universities in funding and selling CDR analysis.
- Third is a CDR-focused, sole college division corresponding to Georgia Tech’s DAC Heart or UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Administration.
Along with the above, we additionally examined how a lot cash university-linked corporations had raised, as a gauge of the establishment’s observe document in serving to to nurture profitable CDR startups.
The backside up strategy concerned looking for the highest hits of papers by CDR methodology on Google Scholar. Determine 1 reveals what number of papers there are for every methodology googled. To start out with, we solely took the primary 10 papers per methodology.
Every paper had between one and eight authors, whom we linked to universities which might be engaged on CDR applied sciences.
We then merged the 2 databases collectively and created an inventory of the highest 30 universities which might be engaged on CDR. Notice that we prioritized universities that analysis expertise on this area — some deal with different elements of CDR, which we didn’t embrace on this analysis. As an example, Columbia College’s CDRLaw, whereas very useful, was not included in these rankings.
Rating Methodology
The rank scoring was damaged down into 4 sections:
- Variety of researchers: 23%
2. Mixed weighted educational quotation efficiency: 30%
- All_citations
- Citations_since_2018
- H-index_all
- H-index_since_2018
- i10_index_all
- i10_index_since_2018
3. College firm influence: 20%
4. College program: 27%
- Unfocused division
- CDR-focused partnership
- CDR-focused division or initiative
Every college was then ranked primarily based on the scaled magnitude of those sub metrics above.
The outcomes from the college rating are as follows in Determine 2. The highest 5 universities are:
- Stanford
- Imperial School London
- College of Zurich
- Australian Nationwide College
- College of Michigan
Every of the highest 5 universities has a lot of school members and devoted departments with a lot of citations — besides ETH Zurich. As an alternative, Zurich has been ranked very extremely on account of its launch of Climeworks which is the main DAC firm on this planet with 108 patents, 10 vegetation and over 800 million USD invested into it which eclipses the remainder of the competitors.
College speciality has been weakly correlated with every of the schools and has been related by having a look at every of the web sites. It’s acknowledged that this isn’t essentially indicative of all of the analysis specialities inside every college and there could also be lacking knowledge factors. The speciality tag is a primary try at making an attempt to map college specialities.
The taxonomy is as follows:
- BECCS — Bioenergy with Carbon Seize and Storage
- CCS — Carbon Seize and Storage
- DAC — Direct Air Seize
- UTL — Utilisation
- AFOLU — Agriculture, Forestry, and Different Land Use
- BLU — Blue Carbon
- OCN — Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement
- MIN — Mineralisation
- ERW — Enhanced Rock Weathering
For a extra in depth rationalization of CDR methodologies taxonomy, see right here.
AlliedOffsets offsets have developed a preliminary college rating system to tell stakeholders which universities are main in CDR analysis and exercise.
We look ahead to suggestions from the market! For extra on our work in CDR, try our newest CDR report right here.
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