A call for standardization of carbon dioxide removal

Key take-aways:

• Seventy representatives of organizations concerned with carbon dioxide removal (CDR) are calling for standards to assess the performance of different CDR approaches in an open letter.
• Climeworks’ Christoph Beuttler, Chief Climate Policy Officer, and Friedel Pretorius, Carbon Market Development Manager, are among the signees, underlining Climeworks’ commitment to setting high industry standards for CDR.
• To avoid the challenges that have occurred with legacy carbon markets, Climeworks believes that clear rules on key criteria for CDR, such as durability, additionality and measurability, are needed before the industry massively scales: the scaling of a high-quality CDR market serving global climate goals must be incentivized, not one that profits from them.
• The letter invites the broader CDR community to join the discussion and participate in the next steps, which envision an independent, not-for-profit initiative dedicated to creating trusted, scientific standards for CDR.

Christoph Beuttler, Chief Climate Policy Officer at Climeworks comments: "Establishing strong monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) standards in the carbon removal industry is very important to make different carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approaches comparable, and incentivize the creation of high-quality CDR that is additional, measurable and highly durable. In essence we need to define what a ton of CDR actually is. The standards set now will live for a long time. We need to make sure they are up to the task, which is what this industry letter is calling for."

Read more about the industry call in CarbonPlan's blog.

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