"A lo largo de los años hemos invertido mucho en nuestro equipo de datos de campo, centrándonos en la elaboración de calificaciones fiables. Si bien esto garantiza la precisión de nuestras valoraciones, no permite la escala a través de los miles de proyectos que los compradores están considerando."
Para más información sobre las tendencias en la adquisición de créditos de carbono, lea nuestro artículo"Key Takeaways for 2025". Compartimos cinco consejos basados en datos para mejorar su estrategia de adquisición.
Una cosa más: los clientes de Connect to Supply también tienen acceso al resto de herramientas de Sylvera. Esto significa que puede ver fácilmente las calificaciones de los proyectos y evaluar los puntos fuertes de cada uno de ellos, obtener créditos de carbono de calidad e incluso supervisar la actividad del proyecto (sobre todo si ha invertido en la fase previa a la emisión).
Reserve una demostración gratuita de Sylvera para ver en acción las funciones de contratación y elaboración de informes de nuestra plataforma.
Despite its urgent need, the CDR market remains scattered across inconsistent standards, competing frameworks, and disconnected data.
This fragmentation is slowing the investment needed to scale carbon removal to climate-relevant levels.
Without common approaches to measuring, verifying, and accounting for removals, investors face high costs and uncertainty. Projects struggle to access capital. Buyers can't compare removal options with confidence. The result? A structural bottleneck that undermines carbon removal's potential as a critical climate solution.
Why is CDR so fragmented?
It is perhaps unsurprising that as a nascent, voluntary market CDR faces a dual challenge of a maze of inconsistent data formats and a lack of clarity on terminology used across the market.
While the carbon markets were already facing this challenge, the fact the CDR market is composed of incredibly diverse, novel technologies, ranging from Direct Air Capture (DAC) to Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, has undoubtedly exacerbated it. For buyers, investors, or ratings agencies, there are many challenges here.
When it comes to assessing carbon projects, consider the basic question of "permanence." How long must CO₂ stay removed to count as permanent? Different methodologies offer different answers. Different projects use different methodologies, and so there’s significant variation in what comes to market. It’s tough ground for buyers to navigate.
Or, for example, a developer working on an RfP has to submit project information through dozens of different templates and formats, often re-entering identical data for various stakeholders. This administrative burden drains resources that could be directed toward project development and community engagement. Developers would benefit from reduced administrative overhead, increased project visibility across platforms, and simplified reporting that reaches multiple stakeholders simultaneously.
The fragmentation shows up everywhere:
- "Additionality" criteria vary between registries, creating confusion about which projects qualify
- MRV standards range from self-reporting to intensive third-party monitoring
- Accounting rules differ between domestic and international frameworks
These inconsistencies cascade through the entire value chain.
A project validated under one standard may not meet requirements in another jurisdiction, limiting market access. Corporate buyers struggle to integrate removals into their net-zero strategies when accounting rules keep changing. Investors can't assess regulatory risks when the rules are unclear.
The real-world consequences are:
- Project developers spend months navigating different regulatory frameworks for the same technology
- Investment decisions get delayed or canceled due to regulatory uncertainty
- Critical removal solutions deploy slowly when climate science demands urgent acceleration
What would a global framework actually look like?
A coordinated global framework needs to address some foundational elements to unlock carbon removal's potential.
Common metrics
This means standardized approaches to measuring CO₂ captured, stored, and maintained over time, regardless of technology or geography.
Think of it like having universal standards for measuring distance or weight. Whether you're operating a direct air capture facility in Texas or an enhanced weathering project in Kenya, the measurement protocols should be consistent and comparable.
Accounting principles
Clear rules for tracking removals across national and corporate boundaries become essential when the same removal project might count toward both a country's climate commitments and a corporation's net-zero goals.
Without proper accounting protocols, there’s a major risk in double-counting the same removal multiple times, undermining the integrity of the entire system.
Quality thresholds
Rather than a race to the bottom, these standards should reflect scientific best practices while remaining achievable for emerging removal methods. Clear quality tiers can help differentiate removal products for different use cases and risk tolerances.
Registry interoperability
This requires compatible data formats, standardized connections between systems, and secure protocols for transferring removal credits. Without seamless technical integration, even perfectly aligned standards can't create functioning markets.
Article 6 and the path to compliance markets
The global framework points outlined above are a prerequisite for integrating CDR into compliance markets, such as through Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Article 6 of the Paris Climate Agreement establishes the framework for international carbon markets, via mechanisms that allow countries to trade carbon credits and work together to meet their climate targets.
Article 6 mechanisms could provide pathways for CDR projects to generate compliance-grade credits that countries can use toward their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
This requires the same foundational infrastructure that voluntary markets need: robust measurement protocols, clear standards, and transparent accounting that prevents double-counting between national and international commitments. As countries increasingly recognize that achieving their NDCs will require removal technologies, CDR projects meeting high integrity standards could become eligible for Article 6 mechanisms, dramatically expanding market demand beyond voluntary corporate purchases.
The coordination initiatives already underway - like CDOP's data infrastructure - are building the technical foundation that could eventually support compliance-grade CDR transactions.
What’s currently happening in the market to break down these barriers?
Several pioneering initiatives are already demonstrating how coordination can unlock finance and accelerate deployment.
Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP): Building market infrastructure
CDOP tackles the data infrastructure problem, harmonizing how project information gets recorded and shared across carbon markets. With support from over 50 organizations - including key CDR players like Isometric, Puro.earth and CDR.fyi - this initiative eliminates the technical overhead that currently fragments market information.
The practical impact? Reduced due diligence costs for buyers and automated analysis that scales market participation.
CDR.fyi: Creating market transparency
By providing trusted data on removal orders, projects, and financings across the sector, CDR.fyi creates the market transparency essential for institutional investment. Central information resources reduce the information gaps that typically constrain early-stage market development.
Carbon at Risk: Making removal risks comparable
This science-based initiative converts publicly available data into standardized risk curves, showing how carbon removal performance varies across methods and time horizons.
Just as financial markets use "Value at Risk" to compare investment risks, Carbon at Risk enables investors to understand and compare removal risks consistently. When investors can assess and price risks properly, capital flows more efficiently toward high-quality projects.
SHIFT-CM Partnership with ICVCM: Aligning science with standards
The SHIFT-CM collaboration brings together 40+ researchers to quantify risks in nature-based solutions, ensuring that market standards reflect cutting-edge science.
When integrity frameworks incorporate the latest research, market confidence increases and investment risks decrease.
The Permanence Trust: A financial solution to permanence
The American Forest Foundation's Permanence Trust tackles a key challenge in nature-based removal: ensuring forests and other natural solutions stay permanent over centuries. Instead of setting aside carbon credits as insurance, this model sells all credits upfront and puts the money into a growing trust fund.
The trust then uses these funds flexibly over time, buying insurance against forest fires, investing in permanent storage technologies, or directly replanting when reversals occur. This approach recognizes that managing natural systems for centuries requires financial resources that can adapt. For buyers, it means clearer pricing and stronger permanence guarantees for nature-based removals.
Cascade Climate: Data sharing initiative
Coordinating 10 leading Enhanced Rock Weathering companies to share deployment data with researchers, Cascade Climate creates the evidence base needed for robust verification protocols and risk assessment, prerequisites for institutional investment.
These initiatives collectively show that coordination creates multiple pathways to unlock finance:
- Reducing transaction costs through standardized processes
- Improving risk assessment through better data
- Increasing market confidence through transparent governance
Why is COP30 so important at this point for CDR?
COP30 in Brazil is happening as CDR deployment looks to accelerate worldwide. Yet a key challenge right now is to avoid these fragmented approaches becoming entrenched through incompatible national policies and regulatory frameworks, such as Article 6.
CDR30's pavilion - the first ever CDR pavilion at a COP - and programming will be essential for building the path towards these breakthroughs. By bringing together policymakers, investors, scientists, and practitioners, CDR30 can facilitate some of the technical discussions and political negotiations that coordination demands.
Beyond COP30, implementation requires sustained collaboration between national governments, international organizations, and private sector actors. The initiatives already underway, mentioned above, provide blueprints for the technical infrastructure and governance frameworks needed to support coordinated global action.
What can be done right now?
Policymakers should prioritize CDR coordination, viewing harmonized standards not as regulatory burden but as infrastructure investment that enables climate progress.
Investors should engage actively with emerging coordination initiatives, providing market signals that encourage further alignment (and, over time, investment).
Project developers can contribute by adopting emerging standards and sharing data that improves sector-wide understanding.
The climate challenge demands coordinated global action. The removal sector's success in building that coordination will determine whether we can achieve the net-zero future that climate science demands.
