Welcome to the Carbon Removals Network, which sets out key features of who we are and what we plan to do.
The network aims to focus and develop existing research and policy to maximise responsible CDR which is closely aligned with local development priorities. This will involve working closely with a range of world regions, and individual jurisdictions, to diagnose opportunities and constraints and help local experts and policymakers develop appropriate local portfolios of CDR through to deployment and finance. This detailed casework will draw on and contribute to a workstream on international governance and finance which will focus on standards and norms but also facilitate the appropriate spread of innovation.
The network has six founding institutions, three from the global south, and three from the global north, plus a number of additional key participants. We will expand this research and policy core through ad hoc recruitment for particular tasks.
We have a funding proposal for four years work which we hope will validate our approach and make its expansion see-sustaining. We plan to send this out to potential funders byQ4 2025, in the hope of starting work early in 2026. In the meantime we are approaching a number of reviewers for comments which we hope will help us improve our plans, but we'd also be very happy to hear from others. A pdf of the proposal can be downloaded from the Outline Core Proposal section of this site. If you would like to comment, however briefly, please do so by Tuesday 23 September 2025 to the network coordinator: [email protected]
It would help us if your comments could cover any or all of the following:
- Commenting on this proposal’s strengths and weaknesses
- Pointing up potential overlaps and complementarities with other Initiatives
- Giving us your public support
- Offering to work with us
- Considering - or linking us to - funding for the programme, in whole or in part
One Minute Read
The Network’s purpose is to maximise responsible CDR as part of national sustainable development strategies:
- Three interacting streams of work – world regional programmes to assess contexts and capacities, country case studies to determine CDR potential , and international governance
- Country studies draw on and build national capacities, are ruthlessly aligned to local development priorities, and go 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 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Contributing to, and drawing on, international knowledge, norms, and incentives, and acknowledging ignorance and constraints where these apply.