The roadmap prepared by the authors, David Sandalow, Julio Friedmann, Colin McCormick, and Sean McCoy, aims to facilitate dialogue at the Fifth Innovation for Cool Earth Forum and is intended for final release at COP-24. The roadmap explores the potential of direct air capture of carbon dioxide as a means of contributing to climate mitigation and providing feedstock for commercial processes. The roadmap covers various aspects of direct air capture, including the need for carbon dioxide removal, available approaches, advantages, challenges, research pathways, policy options, and findings and recommendations. The authors note that direct air capture has been used in submarines and spaceships since the 1940s and 1950s, respectively, and the movie Apollo 13 recounts a dramatic effort to design a CO2 scrubber aboard a damaged spacecraft en route to the Moon.
