Controller. Captain Drawdown is a project of the Carbon Drawdown Initiative, Fürth, Germany, run by Dirk Paessler. Contact for everything on this page: info@carbon-drawdown.de.

The researcher census

The CDR Researcher Census lists researchers who have published on carbon dioxide removal since 2021. For each listed person we process: name, ORCID iD, institution, country, publication titles and counts, citation counts and the pathway of their work.

  • Sources. OpenAlex (scholarly metadata, released under CC0) and ORCID public records (released under CC0). We do not collect data from the researchers themselves, and we hold no contact details.
  • Purpose and legal basis. Mapping who works on carbon removal, for research, journalism and policy. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in making the research landscape of a public-interest field visible (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), the same basis a search engine or a bibliographic index relies on. Informing each of the roughly 95,000 listed researchers individually would be a disproportionate effort (Art. 14(5)(b) GDPR); this notice is the public information instead.
  • What is published. Person-level information only for the researchers in the top lists per pathway (the 100 most active and the 100 most cited worldwide and the 50 of each in Europe since 2021, about 590 people): a profile page and, in the downloadable data, name, ORCID iD, institution, country, paper and citation counts. Everyone else is published as aggregates by country, pathway and sector only, without a profile page. Model-based estimates about a person (career stage, commitment, trajectory) are not published in the data files.
  • Retention. Entries stay as long as the census is maintained; they are refreshed monthly from the sources.
  • Your rights. You can ask for access, correction, erasure or restriction, and you can object to the processing (Art. 15 to 21 GDPR). Write to info@carbon-drawdown.de with your name and, if you have one, your ORCID iD. A removal request is honoured within five working days, and the entry stays excluded from future releases. You can also complain to a supervisory authority; ours is the Bavarian Data Protection Authority (BayLDA).

The company directory

The CDR Company Directory describes companies, not people. Company descriptions are generated by a model from public web pages and may contain errors; corrections go to info@carbon-drawdown.de. Headcounts are not published; the directory shows a size class only.

Website analytics and email

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Social accounts

Captain Drawdown posts on LinkedIn and Bluesky under those platforms’ terms. We reply to mentions and questions; we do not send unsolicited replies or messages.

Last updated 4 November 2026.