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 enhanced weathering researchers in 2025 give the pathway a 41% retention rate, the best of any CDR route, even though only 33 companies list it as their primary focus. Those 33 firms employ just 469 people, the smallest workforce of any pathway on the board, so the researcher base outnumbers the operator headcount roughly three to one. Nearly all that headcount (438) sits in pure-play suppliers, with a thin 29-person sliver at verification and tooling firms and effectively zero inside larger corporate divisions. The so-what: enhanced weathering is still overwhelmingly a research pathway with a startup fringe attached, and the retention curve suggests the talent pipeline is running well ahead of the commercial buildout.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.