The Carbon Removal Standards Initiative is a fiscally sponsored nonprofit project. We are funded by philanthropic donors, both individuals and foundations. We do not accept corporate donations and our work is fully decoupled from the sale of carbon credits.

CRSI spun out from Carbon180’s Entrepreneur In Residence program, but is fully programmatically independent of Carbon180. Carbon180 serves as CRSI’s fiscal sponsor. Fiscal sponsorship enables us to keep overheard and administration costs low and focus entirely on our programmatic work.

No.

At CRSI, we take a bottom-up approach to standardization. This approach focuses on improving rigor and consistency in the many small steps that add up to a carbon removal solution, from measuring transport of dissolved inorganic carbon through rivers to estimating the carbon intensity of energy use for DAC. We identify areas of consensus as well as gaps in existing standards, and we support the development of new standards where necessary. All of this rolls into rigorous, science-based, enforceable regulatory standards.

A complementary approach to standardization is top-down. This approach focuses on setting a quality bar for carbon credits and encouraging the field to move up to and beyond that quality bar using a “meta-standard.” The meta-standard applies to all solutions and projects. In setting a top-down bar for quality, many of the trade-offs and questions are sociopolitical and economic, not technical. Moreover, there is an enormous amount of activity, both for-profit and not-for-profit, focused on voluntary carbon market integrity.

For these reasons, CRSI does not work on top-down meta-standards for credit quality.

We work with a broad range of partners across the carbon removal ecosystem to understand the state of the science and incorporate learnings from real projects into our work. For example, we’re continuously updating our publicly available quantification resources database with the latest academic papers and registry methodologies.

NGOs working on carbon removal policy are key partners in this work. They help us understand what policies are under development, across jurisdictions and sectors, and help us prioritize opportunities to provide technical assistance.

Importantly, we are not competing with any entity developing standards for carbon removal quantification. We are eager to collaborate and include any existing standards in our database, and to make quantification resources easily accessible to policymakers and the public.

First and foremost, we’re building the knowledge management infrastructure to support rigor and transparency in our work and throughout the CDR ecosystem. This primarily takes the form of our Quantification Resources Database, which allows us to organize resources, standards, academic papers, and industry white papers into a central repository. 

In terms of policy, we’re working on projects across CDR pathways and jurisdictions, focusing our efforts where policy can drive a large volume of removals and act as a powerful lever for decarbonization. We also consider where there are gaps or serious conflicts in industry-driven standards development.

For example, we’re working on developing a framework for jurisdiction-level monitoring of enhanced weathering, through aggregation of field data, modeling, and direct measurement of alkalinity in waterways. This work integrates project-level accounting – where most voluntary market activity focuses – with national GHG inventory programs.

We work directly with carbon removal suppliers, buyers, and market-enablers to understand what is technically feasible in the CDR industry today, leveraging industry partners' direct experience with deployments.

But financial independence is extremely important for the integrity of our work. We don’t benefit financially from the sale of carbon credits or growth in the carbon industry.

We operate under the rules of US-based nonprofit organizations, but our work reaches beyond US federal policy.

For example, our research on jurisdiction-level monitoring of enhanced weathering is designed to fit with the IPCC's work on CDR methodologies and the UNFCCC's work on Article 6.