Technologies under development to remove CO₂e from the atmosphere could help restore the carbon balance and thereby play a valuable role in combating climate change. Another set of technologies under development that actively interfere with the Earth’s temperature system are riskier but could be a last resort if efforts to control the release of anthropogenic CO₂e fail.

Carbon management technologies under development include carbon capture and sequestration and biochar, among others. There are also carbon management approaches that would exploit naturally occurring carbon sinks. These naturally occurring carbon sinks include terrestrial vegetation and oceans. Reforestation or afforestation – essentially planting trees – is a low-technology approach that would increase CO₂e uptake from the atmosphere. The amount of CO₂e that could be reduced annually has not been quantified, but these technology sets could potentially support large-scale intervention.

On the order of 200 billion tons of CO₂e cycle through vegetation and ocean surface water in the natural carbon cycle each year. Carbon sinks play an important role in the natural carbon cycle, annually absorbing over 100 billion tons of CO₂ -- although deforestation has been decreasing the amount of CO₂e reabsorbed annually. Human activity has been adding increasing amounts of CO₂e to the atmosphere, with total anthropogenic CO₂e emissions for 2009 estimated at 50 billion tons. Oceans absorb a portion of these man-made releases, but total concentrations of atmospheric CO₂e are rising and unchecked will lead to catastrophic climate change.