Temporary carbon dioxide removal to offset short-lived climate forcers

Temporary carbon dioxide removal (CDR) dominates current deployment, while permanent solutions face feasibility and cost challenges at scale. However, efforts to integrate temporary CDR into climate policies have relied on flawed equivalency assumptions between temporary and permanent CDR that contradict physical climate science: temporary CDR cannot fully offset CO₂ emissions as permanent CDR can. Instead, we demonstrate that temporary CDR can serve as compensation for non-CO₂ climate forcers, particularly for short-lived species whose compensation ratios are shown to be fairly insensitive to the choice of time horizon. For instance, offsetting 1 kg CH₄ requires 498 kg CO₂ with 20-year temporary storage (such as bioplastics) or 101 kg CO₂ with 100-year storage (such as durable wood products). We suggest a critical lifetime threshold that separates short-lived and long-lived species for temporary CDR applications, with implementation requiring differentiated reporting of these categories in climate policies. This framework enables proper crediting of temporary CDR activities in sectors like agriculture, where non-CO₂ emissions dominate and direct emission reductions remain extremely challenging.