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.
Read the industry letter here
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.
About Climeworks
Climeworks empowers people and companies to fight global warming by offering carbon dioxide removal as a service via direct air capture (DAC) technology. At Orca, Climeworks’ DAC facility in Iceland, the CO2 is permanently removed from the air by capturing and geologically storing it for thousands of years with Climeworks’ storage partner Carbfix. Climeworks’ DAC facilities run exclusively on clean energy, and our modular CO2 collectors can be stacked to build machines of any capacity.
Founded by engineers Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher in 2009, Climeworks is on a journey to climate impact at scale. To do so, we strive to inspire 1 billion people to act and remove CO2 from the air. Climeworks is spear-heading the DAC industry globally, with the world’s largest DAC facility and storage installation in operation and a team of 300 Climeworkers determined to contribute to a net-zero future. Our growing customer base includes over 160 companies, including multinationals such as Microsoft, BCG, UBS or Swiss Re, as well as more than 18,000 individual Climate Pioneers.