Crossroads
A middle-of-the-road path balancing conventional and novel removals in a fragmented, uneven world.
Crossroads is the disorderly-world pathway: progress is real but uneven, split between democracies and autocracies, with heterogeneous carbon-removal portfolios across regions. No single method dominates — the world hedges across land-based and engineered removals.
It maps to ScenarioMIP SSP2-ML (medium-low emissions), a middle course between Fast Lane's late techno-scale-up and Long Road's early, steady mitigation. Removal grows through the century without the sharp end-of-century spike Fast Lane needs.
Variant. The Athens deck maps Crossroads to two ScenarioMIP runs — SSP2-ML and a low-overshoot variant SSP2-VLHO. This explorer shows the primary SSP2-ML pathway; the VLHO variant reaches similar end-of-century removal via a deeper overshoot and is available in the full data.
Values from the WITCH ssp2_ML run; net-zero is the year World Emissions|CO2 crosses zero.
Total CDR — Crossroads
Carbon Removal for World, 2005–2100 (Gt CO₂/yr).CDR by method (stacked)
Net CO₂ emissions
Emissions|CO2 (solid) with the energy & industry and land (AFOLU) components (dotted), World, Gt CO₂/yr. Below zero means net removal.