The carbon removal industry has a transparency problem. A new paper in Nature NPJ Climate Action from Georgia Tech geochemist Chris Reinhard and Yale’s Noah Planavsky argues that without a fundamental shift toward openness, CDR risks remaining a “niche, market-defined practice” when what the climate actually needs is a “trusted, scalable, and democratically governed solution.”
That’s a polite way of saying: the current system is broken.
The Problem With Proprietary Carbon Removal
Today’s voluntary carbon market works roughly like this: a startup claims it removed a certain amount of carbon, lists that amount for sale on a registry, and another company buys it to offset its emissions. The oversight is minimal. The data is often proprietary. The accounting methods vary wildly between providers.
CDR startups guard their methods, cost structures, and performance data as intellectual property. Without regulatory requirements or pressure from corporate buyers demanding disclosure, they have little incentive to share. Reinhard — who co-founded a carbon removal startup he has since divested from — saw this disconnect firsthand.
“The data used to quantify carbon removal and how much it costs need to be transparent — the surest route toward learning what works and building public trust in carbon removal as a solution,” Reinhard told Newswise.
Beyond Tonnes: Community Benefits Matter
The paper makes a case that’s often missing from CDR discussions: carbon removal should deliver benefits communities can actually see and advocate for.
Consider the examples they cite:
- Liming — adding limestone to agricultural soil removes carbon while improving crop yields and reducing erosion. Farmers can see the benefit.
- Coastal restoration — sequesters carbon while strengthening shorelines and supporting fisheries. Coastal communities benefit directly.
- DAC with engagement — Georgia Tech’s own direct air capture work builds community engagement into the design process.
The argument is that carbon removal needs social license to scale. If the only stakeholders who understand a project are the startup and the buyer, the project is vulnerable to the same community opposition that plagues mining, pipelines, and waste facilities. But if local communities benefit from removal activities — better crop yields, cleaner watersheds, new jobs — they become advocates rather than opponents.
What Radical Transparency Actually Means
Reinhard and Planavsky propose a specific agenda:
- Identify which removal pathways offer the clearest co-benefits — not all methods are equal in terms of community impact
- Publish cost data transparently — the industry currently treats per-tonne costs as trade secrets
- Map where transparency gaps do the most damage — focusing reform where it matters most
- Build policies that make removal reliable, verifiable, and community-centered — not just market-driven
This isn’t just idealism. They’re geochemists who study Earth’s carbon cycle. They understand the technical dimensions of CDR deeply — and they’re arguing that good science alone isn’t enough. You also need good governance.
The Connection to Accounting
This paper lands alongside today’s CATF report on biomass certification protocols — and the two reinforce each other. CATF found that most biomass CDR protocols have notable accounting flaws. Reinhard and Planavsky argue that the entire market lacks the transparency needed to catch and fix those flaws.
The combination is a warning: CDR is scaling fast, but its institutional infrastructure — the standards, the oversight, the public accountability — isn’t keeping up. If the industry doesn’t fix this proactively, the voluntary carbon market’s credibility crisis could repeat itself in carbon removal.
And this time, the stakes are higher. We actually need CDR to work.