The CDR Policy Scoop

Achieving the EU’s aspirational 2030 target of 5 MtCO₂-e  in permanent removals per year requires an €2.4–6.7 billion in investment. Fast forward to 2040, we’ll need to reach 75 Mt – or even as high as 280 Mt – according to Carbon Gap . The policy, funding, and market implications are enormous. A well-designed EU purchasing programme can have a significant impact on making it happen. Recently...

At the end of August, the UK government released over 500 pages of documentation on how it plans to finance the scale-up of removals. There is a lot to talk about: the UK has committed over £22B to CCUS (including CDR) over 25 years, of which £9.4B has already been allocated in the 2025 Spending Review. It has also recently released its vision for how to integrate CDR into the UK ETS, potentially...

Carbon rating agencies have increasingly become an indispensable pillar of carbon market infrastructure. While originally created to solve deep-seated quality and integrity concerns in the voluntary carbon markets, they are now also playing a role in compliance markets. What really goes into rating carbon removal projects, and what are the expected future developments? With the ICVCM establishing...

Scoop School is back in session. The second lesson: Who’s leading and who’s lagging in carbon removal (CDR) policy? Who’s getting it right, and who’s falling behind? What works in CDR policy design? Is it possible to replicate successes across borders? Yes, durable CDR policy is still in its early stages, but our in-depth looks at the UK, Switzerland, and Germany have proven there’s already a lot...

It may still be summer, but the new series, “Scoop School”, is now in session. First lesson: Carbon Removal Accounting. Which is not the same as MRV, and the lesson will get to that. Countries are facing new and urgent questions regarding how to account for removals, whether it's within the context of the Paris Agreement’s Crediting Mechanism PACM, the EU’s CRCF, or incorporating removals into emi...

Europe’s forests and soils have been acting as an indispensable cushion for our climate targets, currently offsetting around 6% of the EU’s GHG emissions.  But the LULUCF sink - the EU’s natural carbon safety net - has dropped by 30% compared to the previous decade. Recent projections highlight a crucial gap between the climate target and the current sink. Is Europe’s land carbon sink slippin...

The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PACM, also known as the Article 6.4 mechanism) is going through another round of public consultations. One key document on the table is the draft standard on non-permanence/reversals, which has sparked a lot of questions. What are the options on the table? What does it mean for different types of carbon removal projects? How are the various documents up for...

We’ve covered a lot of CDR policy developments in Europe and across the pond in the United States. But, truth be told, the UK is a bit of a blind spot for us. The UK’s Net-Zero Strategy was one of the first to establish an engineered Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR aka CDR) target. And only days before our scoop, the UK government has confirmed its plan to integrate removals into the UK ETS by 2029, w...

Like it or not, the “like-for-like” debate in carbon removal isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Conversations around temporary versus durable, conventional versus novel removals are increasingly diverging.  Should carbon markets foresee separate roles for these removal types, or strive for a common ground that makes all removals comparable? Is true compatibility even possible? Co-hosts Sebast...

The first methodologies for permanent removals under the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation are being finalised. The European Commission’s 8th Carbon Removal Expert Group meeting, held on 10 July, was dedicated to a draft delegated act on DACCS, BioCCS, and biochar. Does this draft piece of legislation do justice to the CDR methods under consideration? Or does it fall short, and the...

Not one week passes without news of major developments coming out of Germany: earlier in the year, Europe’s biggest economy became the first country in the world to enshrine a net-zero target (2045) into its constitution. Following the recent election, the ruling coalition then included carbon removal in its coalition treaty. More recently, a line dedicated to CDR was added to the federal budget a...

A day after the European Commission published its legislative proposal for the EU’s 2040 climate target, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sat down for a timely session to analyse the proposal. Although the expected 90% net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 (compared to 1990 levels) is the headline target, several key elements in the proposal have elicited strong reactions among stakehol...

This gets to the core of the carbon market debate. Reductions, including avoidance credits, currently account for over 95% of credits in the VCM. Meanwhile, removal credits are rapidly gaining momentum, with $6.5B in purchases to date, outpacing the growth of all other credit types. In the Reductions corner, no less than Renat Heuberger, CEO at Terra Impact Ventures and Founder / former CEO at Sou...

One of the world's first regulations to fight corporate greenwashing is on the final stretch. Or is it? The final trilogue, the negotiations between the three EU institutions, was pushed back to June 23rd but was ultimately cancelled. A push by the German government and the conservative EPP group in Parliament has led the policy process off the rails, with the European Commission considering withd...

Should the VCM shape or follow government policy? The Voluntary Carbon Market is at a crossroads as governments ramp up climate ambition and explore carbon markets. What would a genuine alignment between VCM and government policy look like? What are the risks and opportunities? How can the VCM support both national and global net-zero goals?  To help us dig into these questions and more, we’r...

The Paris Agreement's carbon markets could be worth up to $250 billion annually and reduce or remove gigatons of CO2. But how do we operationalise it? How can countries start trading durable removals under the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2 mechanism? Norway and Switzerland have just agreed on the first durable removals transaction under this framework. For their pilots, planned to be executed pre-...

A European CDR Purchasing Programme for Permanent Carbon Removal? Sounds too good to be true? Well, it may become a reality soon. On May 21st, the European Commission held a dedicated workshop on “A Purchasing Programme for CRCF Permanent Carbon Removal Credits”. As stated in its own excellent pre-read, Europe will need to fund CDR with up to €6 billion by 2030 to achieve its indicative target of...

Many projects want to blend public funding with revenue from voluntary carbon markets as carbon removal scales up. Meanwhile, governments have different approaches to it. And sceptics keep questioning whether it makes sense in the first place - what about additionality, corresponding adjustments, and real climate impact? We’re excited to welcome Erik Rylander, the Head of CDR at Stockholm Exergi,...

Against all odds, the Liberal Party just won the Canadian general elections. Mark Carney’s party explicitly campaigned to turn Canada into a global leader in carbon dioxide removal. Canada plans to do so by - among other things - extending its investment tax credit to 2035, supporting a broad range of CDR tech, and introducing dedicated CDR targets for 2035 and 2040. This all sounds incredibly pro...

It's out: the European Commission published a consultation to gather feedback on what the world's largest emission trading system - the EU ETS - should look like after 2031. For carbon removals, integration into the EU ETS represents one of the most promising paths to predictable demand at scale. Whether and how that will happen is still up for debate. A unique opportunity to get involved with suc...

Are we scrubbing the smokestacks and skies of a waste gas, or creating a valuable resource for a net-zero world? As carbon management technologies like CCS, CCU, DACCS, and BECCS advance, policymakers and markets are narrowing down on CO₂’s role. In this CDR Policy Scoop, we dive into: What happens if we treat CO₂ only as waste? ⁠What is the real potential for CO₂ to be commoditized? ⁠How does thi...

How can the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism help scale carbon dioxide removal? Designed to put a price on imported carbon and prevent leakage, but could it also act as a catalyst for scaling CDR? This CDR Scoop cuts through the noise to explore this critical link. We're digging deep to uncover the potential synergies and challenges. To ensure we cover all angles, we're thrilled to welcome...

A fun, interactive, first-of-a-kind live debate with over 1000 attendees signed up. We picked two real heavyweights: DAC, the poster-child of CDR, with over 200 DAC companies founded to date. On the other hand, biochar, responsible for a whopping 84% of all durable CDR deliveries to date. In the DAC corner: Martin Freimüller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Octavia Carbon – the first DAC company in th...

On March 31st, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra floated various ideas for how Europe’s expected 90% emission reduction target for 2040 could be achieved. One of them: letting EU countries purchase United Nations Article 6 credits to meet EU's 2040 climate target. Similar suggestions are currently being proposed by the upcoming German government. This would require undoing a core principle of...

8,000 companies have emission reduction targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. Only around 50 of them have so far purchased durable carbon removal. Imagine if all of them purchased CDR? The impact could be >50Mt of demand. Per year. Starting from 2030. On March 18th, the SBTi released the draft net-zero standard 2.0 which marks a potential inflection point. Will it: Drive co...