Creating carbon removal communities
We help companies and civil society groups to explore carbon removal, to inform better governance and practice.
By growing communities that understand the risks and how to manage them, we envision a high-integrity carbon removal sector that supports effective, just, and sustainable climate action.
The carbon removal challenge
Large-scale carbon removal is essential to achieve net zero and limit climate change. Yet the governance and understanding of carbon removal is limited, leading to uncertainty, risks, and divergence between different groups, which can lead to delays and unsatisfactory outcomes.
Society lacks the guidance, policy, and best practice to achieve high-integrity carbon removal equitably and effectively. Without this, companies are pressing ahead with strategies with unclear risks and impacts, and civil society groups are uncertain how to engage.
Companies and civil society groups need to develop the capacity and tools to understand the risks, opportunities, and challenges around carbon removal, to better inform policy makers and markets, and to jointly build a high-integrity carbon removal sector that supports sustainable climate action.
What is high-integrity carbon removal?
Carbon removal can be implemented in ways that support climate action and wider sustainable development goals, or in ways that do not. The idea of ‘high-integrity’ carbon removal can help ensure better outcomes.
While there is some guidance on best practice, many questions remain unanswered. These questions lead to uncertainties about how carbon removal strategies will fare in the future, and risks that intended outcomes might not be achieved.
Voluntary frameworks and standards provide a helpful starting point for addressing these questions, such as the Science Based Targets Initiative’s Net Zero Standard. But given the lack of agreement on how many of these should be answered, and the fact that best practice will likely evolve over time, static frameworks cannot provide a full solution.
At Carbon Removal Centre, we conceptualise integrity not as a set of criteria, but as a process of negotiation, where different societal values are balanced towards achieving shared goals. High-integrity carbon removal can be better achieved through a collaborative, inclusive approach that balances the three tenets of human-centred design. These shape the design, governance, and practices associated with delivering carbon removal.
Carbon Removal Centre’s human-centred design approach to high-integrity carbon removal
Desirable
Meets the needs and expectations of integrating benefits for communities and biodiversity.
Feasible
Delivers intended outcomes for the climate without adverse effects on other systems, meeting the scale and urgency of the challenge.
Viable
Enables practices and business models that deliver removals within the timeframe available.
Carbon Removal Centre’s human-centred design approach to high-integrity carbon removal
Why work with CRC to achieve high-integrity carbon removal?
Corporates
- Navigate the complex carbon removal landscape with a better understanding of the different actors, approaches, and issues, and how they might impact your CDR strategy.
- Build resilience against transition risks as regulations, markets, and consumer preferences change.
- Shape governance structures in a rapidly evolving sector.
- Identify new commercial opportunities.
- Demonstrate commitment to climate positive outcomes.
Civil society organisations
- Navigate the complex carbon removal landscape with a better understanding of the different actors, approaches, and issues, to better understand the risks, benefits, and interventions needed to capture these.
- Work with corporate actors to build approaches that benefit all society, while identifying which approaches constitute ‘greenwashing’.
- Identify approaches that enhance societal resilience.
- Identify new revenue-raising activities.
- Shape governance structures in a rapidly evolving sector.
In collaboration with
