Bill Gates’ climate investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has endorsed the establishment of the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI), a non-profit organisation, aimed at assisting policymakers in developing rigorous, science-based standards for future carbon dioxide removal (CDR) policies.
“Carbon removal is a public good, and carbon removal standards will largely be set by policy and regulation,” CRSI founder Anu Khan said during the launch of the organisation.
“CDR is fundamentally a tool for climate justice. Justice requires accountability and justice in carbon removal requires rigorously counting the carbon,” added Khan, who has previously worked with climate NGO Carbon180.
She informed that CRSI will have “no financial stake in the sale of credits or the growth of the carbon market.”
This initiative comes at a crucial time, as the carbon removal industry is projected to potentially generate up to $100 billion annually by 2030, despite ongoing skepticism.
Climate watchers are concerned that high-emission industries like oil, gas, and electricity might exploit new climate technologies like CDR to avoid cutting their emissions. However, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has highlighted that carbon removal is essential for achieving net negative CO2 emissions globally.
The Oxford University-backed State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report this year indicates that the world needs to remove between 7–9 billion tonnes of CO2 annually by 2050 to stay within the 1.5°C global warming limit. Currently, CDR projects are removing only 2 billion tonnes of CO2 per year.
According to the Oxford University-backed State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report this year, the world needs to remove between 7–9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere by 2050 to avoid breaching the 1.5°C global warming threshold.