Carbon Removal Philanthropy is Off to the Races, but Nowhere Near the Finish Line

Carbon removal is breaking onto the climate solution scene in a major way, and has garnered the philanthropic backing of some heavy hitters in the past year. Notable examples of philanthropic support for carbon removal solutions include Elon Musk’s XPRIZE, FedEx’s dedicated funding for carbon removal at Yale, and tech companies like Stripe and Shopify “pre-purchasing” credits from carbon removal startups.

On the one hand, this is great news—it shows the philanthropy community catching up to the climate modeling that increasingly shows that to keep global temperatures from rising to dangerous levels, we need to reduce future emissions to zero and then remove past emissions from burning fossil fuels at the billion-ton scale. While research and discussion continues as to the ultimate scale and breadth of carbon removal solutions that will be required—and to the safeguards necessary to ensure carbon removal advances in an equitable way—there are increasingly few pathways to hit a 1.5 degree Celsius warming target without some form of large-scale carbon removal, given that we’ve already locked ourselves into over 1 degree Celsius of warming.

On the other hand, this burgeoning support is just a down payment on what’s needed to scale carbon removal solutions. This term refers to an expanding set of approaches to permanently capture excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including land-based (e.g., forest restoration and adopting agricultural practices that store carbon in soils), technological (e.g., direct air capture and storage), and ocean-based (e.g., macroalgae). None of these solutions have achieved significant deployment to date, and most require major technological advances, both to drive cost reductions and to improve measurement and verification. Nevertheless, ClimateWorks Foundation recently published data that found only 2% of global philanthropic giving is dedicated to climate change mitigation—with carbon removal making up just $25 million of the $1.6 billion in foundation giving in 2019. Even when factoring in recent high-profile donations, this number only roughly doubles.

From our experience running Carbon180 (a U.S.-based NGO working on carbon removal innovation and advocacy), and the ClimateWorks Foundation’s CDR Fund (a philanthropic fund for global carbon dioxide removal research), this amount of funding is grossly insufficient for the carbon removal field to flourish in a way that: (1) accelerates, not substitutes, emissions reductions, and (2) advances equity and justice around the globe as carbon removal solution development and deployment grows. To scale these carbon removal solutions swiftly, equitably and in a scientifically robust manner, we’re going to need grant funding more in line with philanthropic campaigns to stop coal use and to accelerate wind and solar deployment that receive more than $200 million per year and have operated at this funding level for decades.

A decadal-scale commitment of philanthropic funding for research, coalition building, communications and policy advocacy—both in the U.S. and abroad—was essential for wind and solar energy to scale, and a similar philanthropic commitment could do the same for building the political will for carbon removal solutions to flourish in the future. Wind and solar energy benefited from funding for early research and development, combined with policy incentives and mandates to “pull” nascent technology to market (think U.S. Department of Energy’s “SunShot’’ program on the R&D side; German feed-in-tariffs and U.S. state renewable portfolio standards on the demand pull front).

However, we often find that our NGO partners can’t recruit staff to help design new policy ideas, researchers can’t pay for the lab time to test potential breakthrough innovations, and entrepreneurs can’t find impact capital to scale their carbon removal businesses. Corporate investments—such as those announced by Microsoft, Amazon and oil and gas companies like Oxy—are encouraging signs, but they won’t address the demand side of the market equation needed for carbon removal strategies to flourish in the future (and were only possible due to past philanthropically funded policy efforts).

Here’s the thing: If philanthropy decided to move on from the carbon removal field today, corporate and investor support would likely be enough to move carbon removal technologies from idea to market, with three large caveats: (1) The field would emerge too slowly to meet more ambitious climate goals, thus eliminating a central argument for why carbon removal is so critical today. (2) Corporate capital would influence technology development in a way that would prolong their current business interests and practices. (3) Voluntary efforts would fail to adopt standardized and independent measurement and verification oversight. Continued philanthropic support isn’t needed just to catalyze if the carbon removal field emerges, but also to shape when and how the field develops.

Philanthropic funding will be particularly influential in ensuring the equitable and just development and scale-up of carbon removal solutions. Environmental justice and local community groups are largely absent from carbon removal policy creation, project development and advocacy today. However, these voices are essential for ensuring that carbon removal efforts only move forward if they deliver tangible benefits (family-sustaining job creation, local air and water quality improvements, etc.) to the communities in which projects and their associated supply chains will be deployed—not just to the carbon removal solution developers and their investors.

Carbon removal can be developed in a way that helps communities that have disproportionately borne the negative impacts of fossil fuel extraction, and helps current fossil fuel workers find new economic opportunities in a decarbonized world. But history suggests that new philanthropic support is needed to empower stakeholders from these communities to lead the development of carbon removal in this more equitable direction.

For reasons like this and many others, news about high-profile donations to carbon removal should serve as a signal to others to crowd in and fill out the remaining key gaps in the carbon removal field, not as a sign that the field is already saturated. While we see particular value in support for more ambitious and equitable carbon removal policy design, coalition building, and advocacy, there are also major funding gaps related to:

Corporate engagement to push net-zero commitments to net-negative, to ensure measurement and verification of removals are transparent and scientifically robust, and to limit the extent to which companies can rely on carbon removal to avoid more challenging decarbonization efforts.
High-impact research and development funding for carbon removal projects that the private sector and government overlook.
Impact investment in promising carbon removal startups, both from grantmaking budgets as program related investments and from endowments as mission related investments.
Global action to ensure good governance of carbon removal, requiring coordination across sectors and geographies (for example, no equivalent of Carbon180 exists to advance carbon removal policy outside of the U.S.).

Regardless of what strategies new funders choose to support, additional philanthropic funding to advance carbon removal in line with values of equity, justice and science can bring substantial impact today. Carbon removal as a tool to hit the 1.5 degree Celsius climate target in a way that is centered on equity and justice is still far from a fait accompli, even though a livable planet with more opportunities for future generations to prosper depends on it.

Want to learn more about carbon removal? Check out this philanthropically funded primer for more info.

Jan Mazurek, Ph.D., is senior director, carbon dioxide removal at ClimateWorks Foundation. Noah Deich is president and co-founder of Carbon180.

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