The CDR Ecosystem Exists: Now Policy Must Help It Scale
Carbon dioxide removal has moved from research and engineering into pilots, demonstrations, and early markets. Around it sits a growing network of stakeholders. The next scaling challenge is not simply adding more organizations. It is making the relationships among them legible enough to improve policy, grantmaking, investment, procurement, and accountability.
Today’s CDR landscape looks very different from when much of the field was centered on research questions. Companies, buyers, standards, public programs, academic centers, policy organizations, and intermediaries now form a much larger ecosystem. That growth is encouraging, but it has also made the field hard to navigate. Who is doing foundational research or moving ideas into pilots? Who is setting standards, validating methods, financing projects, buying tonnes, or advising policymakers? And how are those actors connected?
These are no longer administrative questions. Policymakers, funders, and investors must synthesize scattered evidence, identify credible leaders for a particular solution, geography, and function, and understand who funds, validates, buys from, or advises whom. Without a shared, current view, they may default to familiar networks, duplicate work, overlook local capacity, or design programs based on incomplete assumptions. A large ecosystem becomes a headwind when its knowledge and relationships cannot be translated quickly into better decisions.
CDR has followed many of the same development steps as wind, solar, batteries, and other clean-energy technologies: foundational science, paper engineering and techno-economic analysis, benchtop validation, small pilots, commercial demonstrations, and repeatable deployment. Those trajectories are rarely linear. CDR adds complexity because it encompasses a range of approaches, from direct air capture and biochar to enhanced weathering, biomass-based removal, mineralization, ocean approaches, and nature-based pathways. The pathways and individual technologies within them are advancing at different rates and sit at different stages of readiness and support.
Early signals that CDR was becoming a distinct research and policy field appeared before there was much of a market. The $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge launched in 2007. The 2011 American Physical Society assessment established an early engineering and cost benchmark for direct air capture. In 2015, the National Academies’ Climate Intervention report helped define CDR as a field, while the Paris Agreement reinforced the long-term need to balance residual emissions with removals.
By 2017, the field’s research portfolio was broadening. A UK Research and Innovation program funded environmental, technical, economic, governance, and social research on greenhouse-gas removal (GGR). A landmark Natural Climate Solutions paper made the scale and diversity of land-based pathways visible. The IPCC 1.5°C report, a second National Academies (NAS) research agenda, a dedicated open-access journal section, and the later CDR Primer gave diverse approaches a more coherent research and policy home.
Public missions, demonstrations, and early demand followed. United Kingdom demonstrator funding and the Carbon Negative Shot signaled larger-scale learning and cost-reduction goals, while the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $3.5 billion for four regional direct air capture hubs backed regional deployment. Frontier’s advance market commitment (AMC) created early demand, the State of CDR assessments added independent benchmarking, and DOE launched a first federal purchase pilot. The pilot completed Phase 1; but as of September 2026, continuation is pending administration guidance.
CDR.fyi’s map and resources hub offers a useful picture of how much the field has grown. A February 2025 snapshot tracked 563 organizations in 49 or more countries: 411 suppliers and 152 ecosystem-service actors, including developers, buyers, MRV providers, standards bodies, financiers, insurers, researchers, and policy organizations.
Even for people who work in CDR, keeping this landscape straight is difficult. To make it more legible, we built a working map of the field. What began as a directory quickly became a taxonomy and synthesis exercise. But a taxonomy is still only the first layer. A useful ecosystem map must show not only who exists, but what role each actor plays, where organizations occupy multiple roles, how capital, data, contracts, standards, and verification flow, and where capabilities are missing.
The Missing Layer Is the Connections
Projects sit inside a web. Suppliers need investment, insurance, procurement channels, protocols, and buyers. Buyers depend on standards, registries, independent verification, ratings, and market intelligence. Policymakers and philanthropy shape incentives and public infrastructure. Academics and NGOs generate evidence, test assumptions, scrutinize claims, and surface environmental and community concerns. In a young field, the same organization may span several roles. That can accelerate learning, but it can also create conflicts that must be disclosed and independently checked.
Stop Building Programs from Static Lists
Policymakers, funders, investors, and buyers should stop treating ecosystem due diligence as a one-time vendor list or relying only on the organizations already in the room. Before designing a grant, procurement, or market-building program, they should start with a current landscape scan and relationship map: who leads by pathway, geography, and function; who funds, validates, buys from, and advises whom; where roles overlap; and which capabilities are absent.
That map should shape action. Calls for proposals can target missing research or deployment capacity. Public funding can support shared infrastructure and independent measurement. Buyers can diversify supply and demand more transparent data. Philanthropy can fund synthesis and pre-competitive learning. Regulators can identify where standards or safeguards are missing. The map should be living, open to correction, and updated as organizations and roles change.
CDR does not lack organizations. It lacks shared ecosystem intelligence. Treating a living taxonomy and relationship map as public infrastructure would help decision-makers see gaps, avoid duplication, disclose conflicts, and direct scarce support toward the combinations of science, deployment capacity, finance, demand, and governance that can move CDR from isolated activity to repeatable deployment.
Makenna Damhorst
Student Advisory Council MemberMakenna Damhorst is a fourth year student in earth and environmental science. Damhorst is a Kleinman Center Student Advisory Council Member and a former Undergraduate Student Fellow. She conducts research with the Clean Energy Conversions Laboratory.
Noah Deich
Senior FellowNoah Deich is a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center. He recently left the Biden Administration, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Carbon Management at the Department of Energy.
Jennifer Wilcox
Presidential Distinguished ProfessorJen Wilcox is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy. She previously served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy.
