Report from the Third Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum

Report from the Third Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum

When the Foundation for Climate Restoration was founded in late 2017, we were committed to restoring the climate by facilitating the development of solutions that can safely and permanently remove huge quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. However, we quickly realized that there’s no shortage of solutions. While we still need more solutions and all of them require further development and scale-up, the real obstacle was creating the enabling environment needed for those solutions to be implemented and scaled. We recognized that we needed to adapt our theory of change to include a focus on creating this enabling environment — the climate restoration ecosystem.

In order to educate our audience about this new ecosystem and keep them apprised of its advances over time, we launched our annual Climate Restoration Forum.

First Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum: Climate restoration is a critical new pillar of our climate agenda.

In 2019, F4CR was launched on the global stage through our First Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum, hosted in the Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In attendance were dignitaries, faith leaders, climate scientists, carbon removal innovators, youth climate activists, investors, and more. The wide-ranging presentations underscored the importance of climate restoration as a new and critical theme in our global climate agenda.

Second Annual Climate Restoration Forum: Climate restoration is becoming widely adopted and is well underway.

In 2020, we continued the conversation virtually with our Second Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum. We brought together panels of experts on science, investment, movement-building, solutions, and more. Over 800 people attended online to learn from the sessions. The Forum highlighted the growing consensus that climate restoration is not only critical, but it’s already underway, with visible progress across sectors.

Third Annual Climate Restoration Forum: Climate restoration is advancing rapidly across sectors.

Just a few short weeks ago, September 30-October 1, 2021, we hosted our Third Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum. As we were planning content for the Forum, we were astonished to see just how much progress had been made since the previous year. It was a challenge to scale back our content and speaker list to a quantity appropriate for a two-day virtual event — and even then, we had fourteen sessions and over 40 speakers! We were thrilled to work with EarthxTV, whose sponsorship of the event elevated our production and distribution quality to a new level. This year’s Forum demonstrated the growing momentum behind the climate restoration movement across sectors.

If you missed this year’s Climate Restoration Forum, don’t worry — all the recordings are available online, and here’s a little teaser.

A few notable quotes from luminary speakers:

“We see these three — climate mitigation, adaptation, and carbon removal / climate restoration — as working in tandem. One doesn’t stop the other, and, on the contrary, they should be mutually reinforcing and sustaining and transformative.” — Sanjeev Khagram, CEO, Director-General & Dean, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Welcome to the 2021 Climate Restoration Forum

“I realized that there’s hope for the future of our earth, where primarily before the conversation around climate action was pessimistic. With climate restoration, we have turned the tables and are being proactive and actually taking action to restore our earth”. — Ashley Meeky, Founder, Youth Leaders 4 Climate Restoration, Youth Lead the Way to Restore Our Climate

“Without withdrawing carbon from the atmosphere, it’s going to be very difficult to reach the targets of net zero. It’s going to be impossible.” — Fredrik Ekström, President, Head of Nasdaq Stockholm, European Fixed Income and ESG, Market Watch: The Growth of the CO2 Removal Marketplace

“It’s no longer a question of if we need carbon removal. Now it’s more of a discussion of which solutions we want to pursue, how we want them to be implemented, where, who we want to be driving these solutions and many other important questions.” — Vanessa Suarez, Senior Policy Advisor, Carbon180, Equity and Justice within Climate Restoration

“Once we become extinct as a species, the oceans will recover. The forest will grow back and so on. So don’t worry about the planet too much. Understand that these climate negotiations are about protecting humanity’s capability to continue to live on this planet. -Kumi Naidoo, Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, Final Stop on the Road to Glasgow: COP 26

“Removing emissions though is like using a vacuum cleaner on your floor. It is a completely different thing than picking up the dirty dishes or sorting things in the cabinet. It’s a different thing. It is taking CO2 out of the air and oceans after it has already entered them. It is the vector of climate restoration” — Julio Friedmann, Senior Research Scholar, Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, Exploring Legislation to Accelerate Climate Restoration

“I was present when political leaders said to us, please continue to make life difficult for us to remind us of the necessity, to take measures that in the short run may contravene national self interest, but are necessary to preserve the earth. I’ve never forgotten it. This is the tremendous position of people, of faith, all over the world to remind the political leadership and everyone. And of course, ourselves as world citizens, that there is no time to lose.” — Rabbi Soetendorp, President and Founder, Institute for Human Values, Igniting Faith for Climate Action

“The fact that climate is changing, isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s the beginning of, okay, so what do we do about it? This is a solvable problem. It’s not snap our fingers and you know, it all gets done in six weeks. It’s going to take a ton of work all over the place, that’s obvious, but it’s actionable. We can do it. Climate restoration is a key part of it in addition to adaptation and mitigation, reducing emissions as quickly as we can doing it equitably.” — Marcius Extavour, VP, Energy & Climate, XPRIZE, Incentivizing Innovation in Carbon Removal

How can I personally contribute to climate restoration?

For most people, learning about climate restoration follows a pathway that looks something like this:

1. “Wait…is climate restoration possible?”
2. “Why isn’t everyone talking about it?”
3. “So, climate restoration is really just another term for carbon dioxide removal, right?”
4. “How can I personally contribute?”

This blog post will focus on step four in the journey.

Let’s start off with the bad news, shall we? Just to get it over with.

You, as an individual, can’t fix the problem, and no amount of eco-friendly product swaps will have a meaningful impact on our climate.

But — and this is where it gets good — don’t let that get you down.

Our collective power has always been more impactful than that of any individual. And the problem of climate change is bigger than anything we as humans have ever experienced. It makes sense, then, that the real opportunity to contribute to climate restoration comes from collective action. Here are a few ways you can channel your individual efforts towards effective collective action:

1. Join or start a local chapter

Advocacy is one of the best ways to advance climate restoration. It promotes education about climate change, the importance of climate restoration, and the concrete actions that policymakers can take to restore our climate. Working with a group of similarly motivated individuals towards advocacy goals can also promote a sense of community and optimism that is important for sustaining efforts to restore the climate. Reach out to the Foundation for Climate Restoration team to get connected to a local chapter near you or to start a new one.

2. Learn more about climate restoration, and encourage young people in your life to learn with you

Climate change can be especially scary to young people, who may not know as much about it and whose futures are most at stake due to climate change impacts. This fear can cause eco-anxiety, a chronic fear of environmental doom.

The Foundation for Climate Restoration offers a training program for young people aged 13–24 to learn, speak, and teach their peers about climate restoration, as well as an interactive digital lesson for kids aged 8–12. We’ll also be releasing a Solution Series in early 2022 to delve more deeply into the solutions that can help restore the climate.

3. Donate

The Foundation for Climate Restoration is a 501(c)(3) public charity, which means that all the work we do depends on our community’s support. Without donations, we wouldn’t be able to host local chapters on four continents or support youth leaders on all six. We couldn’t write white papers, or host Forums, or provide a platform for important conversations between climate restoration champions. Please consider supporting the Foundation financially if you, like us, are committed to restoring a safe and healthy climate.

4. Talk to everyone you know about climate restoration

While the concept of restoring the climate has moved much closer to the mainstream in recent years, most people still haven’t heard of it. In fact, most people don’t yet know that the problem of climate change will not be solved when we get to net-zero emissions. The way the climate restoration movement grows is through the conversations carried out by our community. So don’t be afraid to tell your friends / family / neighbors / colleagues / babysitters / mayor, etc. about climate restoration. It makes a difference.

The 3 Pillars of Climate Restoration

What’s all the Hype with Carbon Dioxide Removal? Is It the Same as Climate Restoration?

Carbon dioxide removal has recently received extra buzz thanks to Elon Musk and his $100M competition with XPRIZE to find the best carbon removal technology out there. While the hype is encouraging — anything to drive climate action is paramount — it’s important to understand how carbon dioxide removal stands apart from climate restoration.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This differs from carbon capture, which is capturing CO2 at a point source, like a smokestack. CO2 from both CDR and carbon capture can be used in a multitude of ways, such as synthetic jet fuel and soda. Remember, these terms simply refer to where the CO2 is coming from, not necessarily where it’s going.

Carbon capture is important for a variety of reasons:

• It provides more concentrated input streams of CO2 than the atmosphere, making the capture process cheaper and more efficient;
• It allows industries with hard-to-avoid emissions to prevent their emissions from reaching the atmosphere;
• It helps grow the supply of CO2 that can be used in commercial products, allowing us to build up a market for the CO2 that will be removed from the atmosphere.

Carbon capture processes are a good thing unless they’re taken advantage of, say, by a coal plant with no intention of transitioning to renewable energy, but wants good PR and tax credits from capturing their emissions and burying them underground.

CDR will ultimately allow us to reach net-negative emissions because it doesn’t rely on emissions as a source of CO2. As you may imagine, removing CO2 from the ambient air is significantly harder than pulling it from emissions since it exists in dramatically lower concentrations. Furthermore, there is less CDR infrastructure in place as it’s a newer field.

The goal of climate restoration calls for us to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to below 300 ppm by 2050. This would require the removal of about 50 billion tons (Gt) of CO2 from the atmosphere per year between 2030 and 2050. Responsible efforts to build up carbon capture and CDR capacity will contribute to building the massive markets and infrastructure needed to achieve this goal.

Here’s the key differentiator between CDR and climate restoration

You could have successful CDR initiatives to convert CO2 into diamonds (shoutout to Aether Diamonds!), use ocean waves for enhanced rock weathering (hey, Project Vesta!), or bury CO2 underground (we see you Carbon Engineering!). However, not all initiatives are created equal, even though they are contributing to building up the technologies and markets needed for climate restoration to succeed.

Climate restoration is a specific and measurable goal and calls for safe and responsible CDR approaches that can meet particular specifications. The 3 pillars of climate restoration are:

• Permanence (or, Durability): CDR technologies we deploy must permanently remove the atmospheric CO2 that is warming our planet. This means that net-neutral solutions, like converting CO2 into jet fuel, are not well-suited to climate restoration, even though they contribute to mitigation goals.
• Scalability: CDR technologies for climate restoration should reach a scale on the order of tens of gigatons. We need the ability to implement CDR technologies at a massive scale if we’re to remove all historic emissions accumulated from the past century.
• Financeability: CDR technologies that fit the climate restoration goal need to have an existing customer. It might be corporations looking to buy carbon removal credits off the voluntary carbon market, or government grants, subsidies, or tax credits. Even better are solutions that convert CO2 into commercial byproducts that serve huge existing markets, like concrete, the second most consumed product in the world, behind water.

As you continue on your climate restoration journey and learn about CDR innovations, it’s important to keep in mind how they fit with these three pillars of climate restoration. Stay tuned as we cover more on the movement to restore the climate.