Radical Transparency Is Required to Scale Carbon Dioxide Removal — a Q&A with Professor Noah Planavsky

Last week, YCNCC Scientific Leadership Team member and Earth & Planetary Sciences Professor Noah Planavsky co-authored a peer-reviewed Comment in Nature Portfolio NPJ Climate Action on “The Importance of Radical Transparency for Responsible Carbon Dioxide Removal.” YCNCC News spoke with Planavsky about why greater transparency is necessary, and how transparency is an important theme across the Center’s work to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

YCNCC: What prompted you to write about the need for “radical transparency” to responsibly advance carbon dioxide removal?

NP: By mid-century we need to scale carbon dioxide removal to massive levels, billions of tons per year, in order to meet climate goals. CDR can be a key part of staving off the worst impacts of climate change, but efforts right now are nascent. Our work for the next ten to fifteen years is to identify a portfolio of solutions that are safe, effective, scalable, and affordable — and that in addition to mitigation deliver tangible co-benefits to communities. In other words, the goal for the carbon dioxide removal community over the next few years is to learn.  The point of making investments today, whether via the voluntary carbon market (VCM) or public policy, is to learn and build capacity for future scale. Transparency is essential for us to be successful in making this happen. Transparency will also be key to building the trust and sociopolitical license we will need to scale carbon removal to the required levels.

YCNCC: What do you mean by “radical transparency” in this context? 

NP: Most of the investment in carbon removal to date has gone to, and will likely continue to go to, commercial enterprises – whose goal besides removing carbon is making a profit. But the primary objective for the broader carbon dioxide removal field this decade is to learn what pathways work as rapidly as possible – meaning what pathways remove carbon and benefit communities. If we want to learn from this ongoing investment in carbon removals we need to ensure that companies share data about their full process. That will include data about costs. 

I have gone back and forth about how I feel about the use of the term “radical transparency.” I want companies to share information about how they calculated carbon removal rates and how much money and energy they spent on the process – that is what we need to be able to learn. I don’t think forcing this level of transparency is all that radical. It is, however, a far cry from current practices.  

YCNCC: How does transparency enable and enhance this learning and capacity building? 

NP: To achieve multi-gigatonne scale carbon removal will require a portfolio of solutions. All of these solutions are, in varying and diverse ways, works in progress. We have a lot to learn – don’t believe anyone that doesn’t embrace this view!. For reforestation and regenerative agriculture projects, we need to learn how to design projects that ensure sustained carbon storage, and protect against the reversal risk inherent to these solutions. For coastal restoration projects, we need to develop more complete accounting of the greenhouse fluxes from systems like mangroves, seagrass, and salt marshes. For biomass carbon removal (BiCRS) like biochar and BECCS, we need to learn to set accurate baselines and clearly account for the carbon efficiency of the range of BiCRS approaches. 

For the geochemical CDR that I focus my research on, enhanced weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), we know carbon removal is happening, and we can measure it academically — but we need to develop high-integrity monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) that is financially operable at multi-megatonne to gigatonne scale. We also need a full accounting of the potential co-benefits of these approaches, such as yield benefits from enhanced weathering. This is very much a partial list — I could go on — but the point is that we have a tremendous amount to learn, and in a very short time. 

Transparency will help us learn much more quickly – not only from conventional academic trials but from incorporating research objectives into commercial deployments where the majority of money into carbon dioxide removal is being invested. With business-as-usual commercial confidentiality practices we will have no chance to achieve scale — or to build trust.

YCNCC: How do we balance commercial desire for confidentiality and intellectual property with the collective benefit you suggest that radical transparency can deliver?

NP: I have co-founded two CDR startups, Lithos Carbon and CREW Carbon, so I appreciate the desire from venture capitalists to create and protect IP, and build “moats.” I don’t stand to make any money personally from these efforts — I am not paid by and did not take equity in the companies – but I do understand what it takes to make it as a company. But I refuse to accept that transparency is a flawed business strategy. If you have robust removals, at reasonable costs, with documented benefits, that should and will garner investment. I have faith that in the end corporate CDR buyers want their sustainability efforts to be put to good use – which includes buying removals that can be verified and that will help the community chart the best path forward. When buyers are forcing real transparency, sharing information becomes an easy decision for companies. 

CDR is a public good, and markets in isolation will not deliver anywhere near the required scale. Massive policy support will be necessary to scale CDR, and ultimately to require corporations to purchase carbon credits. Particularly for the next decade, where the investment in CDR will come from a combination of the voluntary corporate actors and (hopefully increasing) government support, startups and project developers will need to be willing to exchange transparency for the opportunity to scale.

YCNCC: Data sharing and transparency has been a consistent theme for YCNCC in recent years? Can you talk about what this means for the Center and for academic researchers more generally?

NP: Mark Bradford and Sara Kuebbing’s work with the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program (YASSP) and more recently with SHIFT-CM is predicated on transparency. The protocol intercomparison and other analyses they seek to undertake require real-world project data at scale — which can only be provided by commercial project developers. Our enhanced weathering work — to explore the opportunity represented by liming, to quantify yield benefits and other co-drivers, to develop high-integrity MRV that can be financially operable at scale — similarly requires data at a scale that funding for academic research cannot support. 

YCNCC: Any last words?

NP: Radical transparency won’t happen on its own. The CDR research community will need to insist on it. Transparency isn’t popular at the moment, we will need to fight for it.