This chart tracks Enhanced Weathering researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a Enhanced Weathering-relevant paper that year (active); 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. Enhanced Weathering is one of the youngest and fastest-growing pathways. The top envelope is the number actually publishing in the pathway each year.
The useful pattern is how the active band and the dormant floor compare. Enhanced Weathering currently stands at 1,460 active in 2025 — 41% of members, the highest retention of any pathway. Younger pathways show a steep active band over a shallow dormant floor — the people who arrived are still there — while older or broader ones carry a much deeper dormant pool of past one-time contributors. Watching the top envelope over the years shows whether the pathway is still recruiting and keeping researchers.
Read the active envelope, not the total height. At yearly resolution a skipped publication year reads as “dormant” and a later paper as a return, so the dormant bands overstate permanent exits. The working figure for Enhanced Weathering is the top line each year, and its slope over 2021–2025 is the real signal.
What the chart shows today
1,460 active researchers in 2025 make enhanced weathering the stickiest pathway in the census, with 41% of everyone who has ever touched the space still publishing or building today. The trajectory is steep: the active cohort has roughly tripled since 2021 while dormancy stayed flat, which is the inverse of what we see in biochar or DAC. Only 33 enhanced weathering companies show up in the current supplier directory, so the researcher-to-company ratio here is wildly lopsided compared to biochar’s 377. Translation: the science bench is loaded, but the commercial layer is still a rounding error, and that gap is where the next two years of company formation should land.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.