YCNCC’s Beck Woollen Presents EW Paper at the 7th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop

Management of common-pool resources poses an economic challenge. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a rapidly growing field. Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture (YCNCC) researchers suggest these two topics–not typically part of the same discussions–can beneficially be coupled.   

YCNCC Researcher Beck Woollen attended last week’s Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop 7 at Indiana University Bloomington, where he presented a conference paper entitled Common-Pool Resource Management Problems in Enhanced Weathering Deployments for Carbon Dioxide Removal. Beck participated in a Workshop panel called Bridging Jurisdictional Divides: Polycentric and Multi-Level Governance for Climate Resilience and Sustainable Resource Management.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom founded the Ostrom Workshop fifty-one years ago and pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to natural resource governance and institutional design that won Elinor Ostrom the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009. This year’s Workshop convened over 300 researchers addressing a wide range of topics intersecting with the commons and governing institutions.   

Beck’s paper, co-authored with YCNCC Scientific Leadership Team member Noah Planavsky, explores how enhanced weathering (EW) can be considered in the context of common-pool resources. This reframing has implications for the optimal deployment of this promising method of CDR. Specifically the paper posits a collaborative, polycentric framework of EW governance, implemented at the river-catchment level, to better manage the risk of secondary carbonate precipitation, which YCNCC scientists have studied extensively and if left unchecked can potentially significantly reduce EW’s net CDR benefit.  

Beck and Noah plan to continue to advance this promising research, in collaboration with Carbon180’s Anu Khan and Georgia Tech’s Chris Reinhard, by developing comparative case studies and ultimately specific policy recommendations. If you have questions, or would like to learn more, you can contact Beck here.