WHITE PAPER: Digital Infrastructure for Carbon Removal
The Carbon Business Council and Climate Collective published a white paper about Digital Infrastructure for Carbon Removal. Developed by a working group of Carbon Business Council members and affiliates and published with generous support from the Climate Collective, the white paper outlines key challenges the carbon removal sector faces; identifies opportunities where digital infrastructure can offer solutions to help address these challenges; and puts forth a set of focused recommendations for the carbon removal sector on the adoption of digital technologies.
Software and other digital infrastructure have dramatically transformed every industrial sector of the global economy over the past few decades, from reducing costs to increasing efficiency and unlocking scale. Digital technologies are already critical components of ongoing global efforts to scale climate finance, decarbonize societies, and build market mechanisms to address challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate adaptation, and the energy transition. As the white paper notes, the rapidly growing carbon removal field will be no exception.
Digital infrastructure for carbon removal will encompass a broad array of mature and emerging technologies. These include, but are not limited to, remote sensing, cloud computing, mobile applications, artificial intelligence (like machine learning and large language models), and Internet of Things (IoT), as well as blockchain and public distributed ledgers. Just as we will need a diversified portfolio of carbon removal methods to reach gigatonne scale, a robust portfolio of enabling digital tools will be required to create new efficiencies, reduce costs, increase trust and transparency, and build new market infrastructure. Many of these digital technologies are at early stages of development, and we must start testing and deploying them now.
Thank you to Carbon Business Council members for their input and creative ideas in making this white paper a reality, along with a variety of stakeholders who provided invaluable feedback. Toby Bryce served as lead author. Ben Rubin and Isabella Corpora of the Carbon Business Council are co-authors. Working group members include: Alison Filler, Climate Collective; Anna Lerner Nesbitt, Climate Collective; Anna Watson, Toucan; Chase Dwelle, Fix6; Christiaan Gevers-Deynoot, South Pole; Göker Avci, Covalent; Grant Faber, Carbon-Based Consulting; Hayley Moller, Thallo; Ivar Wiersma, Thallo; Jodi Formosi, Bella Biochar; John Auckland, Seafields; John Hoopes IV, Toucan; Leslie Chao, Climate Collective; Mike Cipresso, Carbonfuture; Mira Nagarajan, Origen; Nick Rockwell, Alcove; Onur Eren, Covalent; Okelo Anthony Onyango, Octavia Carbon; Peter Olivier, UNDO; Radhika Moolgavkar, Nori; Sebastian Manhart, Carbonfuture; Stephen Wemple, Spero Ventures; Washington Kamadi, Octavia Carbon. Thank you to our partners for their helpful review, including Jonathan Rackoff of the HBAR Foundation and Cara Maesano and Rudy Kahsar of RMI.
Key Recommendations:
-Start deploying now. Just as we must start scaling high-quality carbon removal now to meet our mid- century climate targets, we need to accelerate the parallel development, testing, and deployment of accompanying digital infrastructure.
-Emphasize function. Digital infrastructure companies should place a strong emphasis on communicating the problem their technology solves in clear functional terms, avoiding jargon and highly technical descriptions.
-Engage the public sector. Digital infrastructure companies should engage policymakers now to develop collaborative and appropriate regulatory structures for digital market infrastructure for CDR.
-Deliver equitable outcomes. Digital infrastructure has great potential to contribute to the responsible and equitable deployment and scaling of CDR by enabling broader and more distributed market participation across the board (suppliers and buyers), as well as by reducing market friction and unnecessary transaction costs so that a greater proportion of the credit value accrues to the suppliers who are delivering the climate impact.
-Focus on carbon removal quality. Digital infrastructure developers should have a clear, consistent, and strong bias towards high-quality carbon removal credits generated by a transparent, high-integrity process and independently verified against rigorous third-party standards. dMRV and other digital infrastructure have a potentially vital role to play in achieving this goal.
