CDR in 2022 and Beyond — White Paper Highlights Rapid Advancement of Carbon Dioxide Removal Industry
If you’ve been following the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry for the last few years, you’re probably blown away by the progress — just like us! CDR has become much more widely known, and the number of companies working in the space has skyrocketed. Competitions like XPRIZE’s Carbon Removal Prize are helping spur even more innovation, and funding from corporations has increased beyond what anyone could have predicted. It’s exciting to see and sometimes overwhelming to keep up with.
Rewind to 2019, when F4CR hosted the First Annual Global Climate Restoration Forum at UN headquarters in New York City. In conjunction with that event, we launched a white paper, describing the goal of climate restoration and how we envisioned different CDR solutions as contributing to its success. The paper was exceedingly helpful in getting members of the growing climate restoration movement up to speed. After reading the paper, they understood our perspective as an organization and had an overview of what looked, at the time, like the most promising solutions.
Given the rapid growth of the CDR sector, though, that paper couldn’t serve our needs forever. While we put out several updates over the years, eventually, too much had changed. Solutions estimated to have only a modest potential to scale prior to 2019 started looking far more promising. Solutions that seemed hard to finance in 2019 became viable thanks to corporate support (including Stripe and Microsoft). And, solutions that would require policy support to be widely adopted started looking possible as more policy makers began to understand the need for CDR.
We decided to rewrite our white paper, with all of these changes in mind. Now, we’re excited to present it to you, our community. We hope that it will provide you with a clearer understanding of the work of climate restoration, the opportunity that the public sector can play, and how individuals can contribute. We also hope you’ll spend some time looking through the sources listed in the footnotes to more deeply explore any you find intriguing — there’s a lot to delve into!
If you want more in-depth information about any of the CDR solutions mentioned in the paper or in the Appendix tables, make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter. Throughout 2022 we’ll be releasing our Solution Series, highlighting one type of CDR solution per month. Follow along throughout the year and you’ll be a pro by 2023!
Most of all, let us know what you think. Drop us a line in the comments here. We love hearing from our community.