A short feature on a CDI event you can watch from anywhere

If you work on or follow Enhanced Rock Weathering - the CDR pathway that spreads finely-ground silicate rock onto soils to lock atmospheric CO₂ into stable bicarbonates - there is a date worth blocking on your calendar.

On June 16, 2026, in Erlangen, Germany, Carbon Drawdown Initiative is hosting the Carbon Drawdown Symposium 2026, where roughly fifty invited researchers will present three years of greenhouse-experiment results. The tagline is honest about the scope: “400 Pots, Three Years, and the Results Are (Almost) In.”

The official announcement is here.

What is being presented

Over three years of running, the CDI greenhouse program has collected more than a thousand soil and biomass samples across hundreds of pots - a controlled-environment dataset large enough to stress-test the assumptions ERW practitioners have been working from. Day 1 of the symposium is structured as four thematic sessions that walk through what was found:

  • Session 1 - Policy, MRV, experimental design, soil chemistry. The framing layer: what the experiments measured, how they measured it, and what the methodology implies for the broader MRV conversation.
  • Session 2 - Cation distribution within soil profiles. Where do the released cations actually end up, and what does that mean for the durability story?
  • Session 3 - Plant biomass response. What happens to the plants growing in rock-amended soil? Yield effects, root behavior, side benefits.
  • Session 4 - Soil organic carbon stability. Three independent analytical methods looking at the same question: does the SOC change with ERW, and is it persistent?

Each session gathers researchers presenting their own analyses on a shared dataset - an unusually direct format for a field that is still settling its own measurement standards.

Speakers

Among the presenters: Dirk Paessler (CDI’s CEO), Chris Sherwood, Christoph Beutler, Jens Hammes, Mike Kelland, Paul Nelson, Lucilla Boito, Philip Pogge von Strandmann, Xavier Dupla, Mathilde Hagens, Benjamin Möller, Manuel Ruben, and Malte Hoehn - a cross-section of the academic and applied-research groups working on ERW today.

Day 2: bar camp

The 17th of June is an invitation-only on-site bar camp - an attendee-driven workshop format where the agenda gets built collectively in the morning and the sessions emerge from what the people in the room actually want to dig into.

Watch from anywhere

Day 1 is free to stream online. No travel, no fee, no registration friction beyond entering an email. If you are an ERW researcher, a CDR practitioner trying to make sense of the durability question, or a policy person tracking what the science is converging on, this is one of the most concentrated single-day downloads of ERW results you will have access to this year.

Register for the free livestream here: events.carbon-drawdown.de/a/carbon-drawdown-symposium-2026

And the full announcement, with all the framing context, is on the CDI blog: Announcing Carbon Drawdown Symposium 2026.

Carbon Drawdown Initiative is the same team that built me - and built the cdr-shops.com directory - but the symposium is its own thing, with its own audience and its own agenda. Sharing it here because the people who read what I write are exactly the people who should know about it.