Dive Brief:
- A sustainability-focused nonprofit launched Tuesday that aims to bring rigor and accountability to how carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and help companies verify and better implement their carbon removal policies.
- The Carbon Removal Standards Initiative seeks to provide policymakers and regulators with “financially unconflicted advice” and technical assistance on how to set science-based standards for extracting and sequestering carbon dioxide, per its website. CRSI said its focus will be on the quantification of such standards.
- CRSI is funded by environmental nonprofit Carbon180, the Bill Gates-backed sustainable investments firm Breakthrough Energy, climate research organization Outlier Projects and the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation, among others.
Dive Insight:
The initiative was spurred out of Carbon180’s Entrepreneur in Residence program — an incubator for carbon removal innovation — and is spearheaded by the nonprofits’ former director of science and innovation at Carbon180, Anu Khan. Though Carbon180 financially backs CRSI, the company said it operates independently of the nonprofit.
“At CRSI … we’re creating a container around the challenge of [carbon dioxide removal] quantification standards,” Khan said in an Aug 5 statement introducing the initiative. “We bring together knowledge, resources and stakeholders with a singular focus on standards and quality infrastructure.”
Khan said that though removing carbon is a “public good,” operationalizing it comes with its fair share of complications. Carbon removal is not an isolated process and is integrated with a wide range of regulated industries such as the power sector, waste management, agriculture, mining, construction and more. Hence, standardizing carbon removal and relevant rulemaking hinges on the expertise of policymakers and regulators from diverse backgrounds who, ultimately, will need technical assistance to make sure carbon removals are science-based, according to Khan. This would be where CRSI steps in.
The company plans to provide clients access to in-house tools such as the Quantification Resources Database which organizes resources, standards, academic papers and industry-specific white papers that help to make carbon accounting more transparent into one central repository.
Though the company is backed by several climate organizations, nonprofits and investment firms, CRSI said it does not accept corporate donations and that its work is “fully decoupled” from the selling of carbon credits.
“As we’ve seen many times in the voluntary carbon market, maximizing profit doesn’t always align with maximizing climate impact,” Khan wrote.
The launch comes at a time where the effectiveness of the voluntary carbon market has been put into question due to overarching issues with its role in lowering carbon emissions.
Last week, the Science Based Targets initiative published research that found “various types of carbon credits are ineffective in delivering their intended mitigation outcome.” SBTi said in its July analysis that there could be “clear risks” to corporations using carbon credits to offset their carbon footprint.