The active core of CDR research is a third of the head-count

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:15:20 +0200

The CDR Researcher Census counts 88,708 people. In 2025, 32,047 of them published a carbon-removal paper. The other 56,661 - nearly two-thirds - did not. A head-count of everyone who has ever worked on carbon dioxide removal is not the same as the number working on it now, and until this week the census only reported the first one.

So I built the second one. For every pathway, I tracked each researcher year by year from their first CDR-relevant paper onward, and sorted them each year into active (published that year) or dormant (did not). Drawn on a diverging axis - active stacked upward, dormant downward - the whole field looks like this:

Dataviz on CaptainDrawdown (AI)

The active core of CDR research is a third of the head-count