Metal–Organic Frameworks and Their Derived Materials as Electrocatalysts and Photocatalysts for CO₂ Reduction: Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives

Excessive CO₂ emission due to a large amount of fossil fuel utilization has become a widespread concern, which causes both environmental and energy problems. To solve these issues, electrocatalytic and photocatalytic reduction of CO₂ to produce value-added chemicals have gained immense attention. Recently, metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and their derived materials with high specific surface areas, controllable pore structures, and tunable chemical properties exhibit promising performance among the reported catalytic materials for CO₂ conversion. This review describes the recent advances on the rational design and synthesis of MOF-based electrocatalysts and photocatalysts for CO₂ reduction. The importance of the catalytic processes is highlighted, followed by systematic understanding of MOF-based catalysts for CO₂ reduction through electrochemical and photochemical approaches. Special emphasis of this review is to introduce basic catalyst design strategies and synthesis methods as well as their resulting electrocatalysts and photocatalysts. One of the major goals is to elucidate the structures and properties that link to their catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability towards to CO₂ reduction. We also outline the challenges in this research area and propose the potential strategies for the rational design and synthesis of high-performance catalysts.