Welcome to the Carbon Removals Network website, which sets out the key features of an activity still in development, which we hope can be funded and launch by Q1 2025. The section "How You Can Help" sets out a number of ways you can contribute.

One Minute Read

The Network’s purpose is to maximise responsible CDR as part of national sustainable development strategies:

  • Two interacting streams of work – country studies and international governance
  • Country studies nationally owned (+ building national capacities), ruthlessly aligned to local development priorities, and going beyond lists of potential CDRs to provide research support for environmental, economic and policy studies needed to develop sustainable portfolios of CDR through to deployment
  • International governance seen not only in terms of issues of regulation and standard setting on cross-boundary issues but supporting and facilitating CDR development in individual jurisdictions (eg through knowledge exchange)
  • Open structure, widely recruiting and mobilising research and policy experts into custom designed ad hoc project teams to support both work streams
  • Rigorous open & accountable knowledge-based work to aid rapid, robust learning
  • By locating CDR within sustainable development, opening new sources of finance

Our Aims and Values: how we approach country studies of carbon removal

  1. Anchored in realism about the socio-political nature of all assessments. This involves: Avoiding the myth of an asocial world against which ‘ideal’ maximum possible removals can be referenced; Embracing the principle of the Hartwell Paper (Prins et al. 2010) that: "decarbonisation will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other goals which are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic." Ensuring local ownership of country studies and their results.
  2. Strong scientific base: work to be grounded in, and carried out by, current experts in science and policy, and in the local environmental, social and cultural conditions that apply in each jurisdiction.
  3. High research standards: work to involve fully informed consent from participants and conform to the Oxford principles on R&D (see footnote 2 in the outline proposal) to ensure open and accountable results, and such other conditions on research practice as the network might agree.
  4. Going beyond advocacy: a full assessment to include support for work on issues that may be key to building and implementing a local removals portfolio: Full economic assessment of impacts, taking account of synergies and trade-offs; Distribution of impacts on lives and livelihoods, including economic and safety/health issues; Work to integrate proposals for removals within other climate action, and climate action within other sustainable development goals and/or local development priorities, with the aim of encouraging international public and private finance to support development packages in which removals play a significant part.
  5. Contributing to, and drawing on, international knowledge, norms, and incentives, and acknowledging ignorance and constraints where these apply.