This chart tracks CDR researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a CDR-relevant paper that year (active), stacked upward; below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. The top envelope is the real, working research workforce each year — the number of people actually publishing, not the cumulative head-count.

The useful pattern is the gap between the two. The active envelope grows steadily — the field genuinely recruits — but the dormant pool below grows faster, because carbon-removal research has a large one-paper-and-gone population. A cumulative census counts everyone who ever published; this chart separates the people still working from the people who passed through once.

Read the active envelope, not the total height. Yearly resolution means a researcher who simply skips a publication year shows as “dormant” and returns later, so the dormant bands overstate permanent exits. The honest headline is the top line: how many researchers are actively publishing on CDR right now, and how fast that number is climbing.

What the chart shows today

32,833 researchers published a CDR-relevant paper in 2025, up from 10,753 in 2021, a 3.05x climb in the active workforce above the line. Below the line, the dormant pool grew faster: 44,749 people who published earlier in the window but not in 2025, of whom 26,454 are deep dormant (silent two or more years) and 18,295 recently dormant. The teal base tells the sharper story - 23,746 of the 2025 actives were new entrants, meaning roughly seven in ten people publishing this year had never published on CDR before. Of the 77,582 researchers with any paper in the window, only 42.3 percent were active in 2025, so the field is growing mostly by recruiting fresh authors rather than retaining the ones it already has.

Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.