Put carbon back, and life comes back.
Carbon removal is the second half of the climate solution. We have to stop emitting — and we have to take back the carbon already in the sky, by returning it to living soils, ecosystems and the things we build. Do that, and life comes back with it. Here is what it is, why it matters, and where to begin.
The second half of the climate solution
For decades, climate policy chased one track: emit less. It is essential — and it is not enough. To hold warming near 1.5°C we also have to take back carbon that is already in the air. That is carbon removal, and it is the literal second half of the climate solution.
The good news: we don't have to invent our way out. Life has pulled carbon from the sky for billions of years — forests, grasslands, peat, plankton and soils built the living world by doing exactly that. The work now is to help life do it again, at scale. And where carbon returns to the living world, life returns with it.
On this page: a film · the four domains · many wins at once · how the world frames it · what a tonne is worth · counting & funding it · watch & read
Our starting point: carbon is a proxy for life
Everything we do begins with a simple observation we call the carbon proxy hypothesis. Where carbon comes back to the living world, life comes back with it. Because healthy soils and bio-based buildings literally hold carbon at scale, CO₂ becomes a powerful measure of the health of our ecosystems — and of our economy. Carbon you can count; life you can feel. One is a reliable proxy for the other.
Count the carbon, and you hold a workable handle on the return of life. That handle is what makes this real work measurable, fundable, and able to scale.
A matter of life and death
This matters because life is disappearing on our watch. Since 1970, the average size of monitored wildlife populations has fallen by roughly 70%. In protected nature reserves, the biomass of flying insects — the base of countless food webs — has dropped by more than 75% in a single generation. Much of this has happened inside one human lifetime.
This is not a side effect of the climate crisis. It is the crisis. And, unlike much else, it is reversible. Bring carbon back to the land, the seas and the things we build, and you create the conditions for life to recover.
We choose to take responsibility for that recovery — for the unfolding of life on Earth itself. We call this conscious evolution: life grown aware enough of itself to tend itself on purpose. Carbon removal is the doorway in. It is easy to understand, it can be measured, and — through carbon finance — it can pay for the return of life into the everyday economy.
See it in three minutes
If one short film holds the whole idea, it is this one — a reminder that the most powerful carbon-capture machine ever built is also the most ordinary.
Nature Now · Conservation International, 2019 · 3:39. More films are gathered in Watch & read at the foot of this page.
FROM IDEA TO PRACTICE
It's simpler than it sounds
Strip away the jargon and one question remains: where can carbon go, and how do we get it there? There are four great storehouses — and a growing community of farmers, builders, entrepreneurs and scientists learning to fill them. Filling them is how ecosystems get the room to bounce back, and how the built world turns from a carbon source into a carbon sink.
Four places to put carbon back
Land & soil
Regenerative farming, agroforestry, restored peatlands. More carbon in the soil means more fertility, more water held, more food — and more life underground.
Ocean & coast
Mangroves, seagrass, salt marsh and seaweed. These ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems lock carbon into waterlogged soils for centuries, shelter coasts, and ease the acidifying of the sea.
Rock & minerals
Enhanced weathering spreads crushed silicate rock — olivine, basalt — on land, where it binds CO₂ into stable minerals for millennia, and feeds the soil as it goes.
Construction
Buildings made of plants. Timber, bamboo, hemp and straw hold biogenic carbon in walls and roofs for decades — the built environment as a carbon sink, not a smokestack.
Together these four domains can hold carbon at the scale the climate needs — while bringing life back on land and at sea.
Already happening — meet the pioneers
This is not theoretical. Pioneers are already at work:
- Carbon farmers — arable and livestock farmers building soil carbon with cover crops, compost, lighter tillage and fibre crops.
- Bio-based builders — using flax, hemp and straw to lock CO₂ into buildings for the long term.
- Peat-meadow managers — raising water tables so peat soils stop burning away into the sky.
Until recently they worked in isolation, without a shared way to measure or fund the carbon — and the life — they bring back. That is the gap this page is really about.
See it in action
Four short films, one for each domain — proof that this is practical, not theoretical.
MANY WINS AT ONCE
More than carbon
Here is the quiet superpower of nature-based removal: because it works through living systems, it pays off across almost every policy goal at once. The same hectare of healthier soil, restored peat or bio-based building does many jobs:
- Nitrogen — less fertiliser; rewetted peat cuts N₂O emissions.
- Biodiversity — restored habitats through reforestation and wetland recovery.
- Water — better quality and more water held in the landscape (biochar, peat).
- Circular economy — bio-based materials replace fossil raw materials.
- Climate adaptation — peat restoration prevents land subsidence (an estimated €22 billion saved over time).
- Farm income — every 1% more soil carbon is worth around €180 per hectare per year in extra yield.
One action, many returns. That is why carbon is such a useful organising principle: aim at carbon, and you hit climate, nature, water and rural livelihoods together.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
How the world frames carbon removal
You will meet a lot of language around this work — CDR, NbS, negative emissions, sequestration, offsets. It can feel complex. Here is the honest map, and where we sit on it.
1. The science — the IPCC
The science is settled on the need. Every IPCC assessment has stated it more firmly:
“All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified.” — IPCC SR1.5, 2018
“CDR is required to achieve … net zero CO₂ and greenhouse gas emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2°C or lower.” — IPCC AR6, 2022
How much? The independent State of Carbon Dioxide Removal estimates the world needs to remove 7–9 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year by 2050. Climate Cleanup puts the full repair job at around 1,500 gigatonnes — roughly the amount living things already hold. We call that doubling nature.
2. Green and grey — two kinds of removal
Removal comes in two flavours. Green (nature-based) removal works through living systems — carbon farming and most bio-based construction. Grey (technological) removal stores carbon in geology or minerals — BECCS, DACCS, BioCCS. Green is cheaper, ready today, and rich in side-benefits; grey is promising but expensive, energy-hungry and not yet ready at scale. We need both — and we lead with green, because it works now and gives back to life.
| Green (nature-based) | Grey (technological) | |
|---|---|---|
| Readiness | High — usable now | Low — still in R&D |
| Cost | Low–medium | Very high (€200–1,000/tonne) |
| Co-benefits | Many (biodiversity, water, nitrogen) | Few |
| Scalability | Large, via farming & nature | Limited by energy & space |
| Permanence | Medium (decades–centuries) | Potentially many centuries |
3. The rulebook — Europe's CRCF
In 2024 the EU adopted the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) — the first EU-wide framework to certify removals and fight greenwashing. It recognises three kinds of activity:
- Carbon farming (held for at least 5 years) — soil, forests, wetlands, with required benefits for nature.
- Carbon storage in products (at least 35 years) — bio-based construction and materials.
- Permanent removal (centuries) — geological storage via BECCS, DACCS, mineralisation.
Every certified activity must pass four tests the EU calls QU.A.L.ITY: honest Quantification, Additionality, Long-term storage and sustainability. The CRCF sits inside a wider European push — the Green Deal's goal of climate-neutrality by 2050 and net-negative after, the Industrial Carbon Management Strategy, and a live debate about bringing permanent removal into the EU emissions-trading system. (See the Commission's CRCF page.)
4. The policy is moving — the Netherlands
This is no longer a fringe idea — it is becoming policy. The Dutch government's Routekaart Koolstofverwijdering (March 2025) is blunt about it:
“Carbon removal becomes, alongside emission reduction, a second necessary track within climate policy.”
It sets an indicative goal of 20–25 million tonnes of CO₂ a year removed in the Netherlands between 2040 and 2050. And the financing model already works in practice: in the LVVN fibre-crop pilot (€50 million, run by the Nationaal Groenfonds), farmers were paid for the tonnes of CO₂ they actually stored by growing flax, hemp and straw — the evaluation showed carbon certificates can finance the bio-based supply chain. Provinces are next: CE Delft built a decision framework for Utrecht, Gelderland, Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland, and carbon sequestration is moving into regional land-use plans.
5. Keeping it honest
The idea that we must actively remove carbon — not merely stop adding it — was, for a long time, a fringe one. The physicist Klaus Lackner is widely credited as the first to propose capturing CO₂ straight from the air, in the late 1990s. And where Lackner gave the idea its engineering, the scientist and communicator Tim Flannery gave it a public voice — his books Atmosphere of Hope (2015) and Sunlight and Seaweed (2017) were among the first to make the case for nature-based removal, from kelp forests to soil and biochar, vivid and hopeful for a wide audience. It is now an assessed field of science, anchored by the Royal Society (2018) and the US National Academies (2019).
And because a tonne ‘removed’ is worth nothing if it doesn't stay removed, an ecosystem of watchdogs keeps the claims honest: CarbonPlan publishes open analysis of whether projects deliver; CDR.fyi tracks who is buying and delivering; Carbon Market Watch scrutinises the rules. Removal only works if it is real, additional and lasting — and never a licence to keep polluting.
6. Where Climate Cleanup fits
The global frameworks set the rules. Our work is to turn them into practice — and to keep bending the frame back toward life. We helped publish the Dutch editions of Drawdown and Regeneration and co-founded Drawdown Europe. We built the world's first open certification for carbon storage in buildings and authored an open protocol for ocean-stored carbon. And we work across all four domains at once — from a Natural Climate Solutions lab at the Port of Amsterdam to farms, forests and shores. The frameworks tell you a tonne is real. We try to make sure a tonne also means more life.
FROM CARBON TO VALUE
What a tonne is worth
A tonne of CO₂ in the atmosphere does real damage — and a tonne taken back out avoids that damage. So a removed tonne is worth, at the very least, the harm it prevents. Governments are starting to put that number on paper: the City of Utrecht uses €1,100 per tonne; the Province of Utrecht uses €875, following the German Environment Agency's calculation of the social cost of carbon. And the science keeps pushing the figure higher: a 2026 Nature study that traces a tonne's damage back to its source finds that one tonne emitted in 1990 will cause roughly $1,840 more in global damage through 2100 (a wide range of $500–5,700). Seen this way, the numbers get large fast — and they point the other way, toward value created rather than damage done.
The value, in numbers
- Damage per tonne CO₂
- €875 (Province of Utrecht) – €1,100 (City of Utrecht)
- Future damage from one 1990 tonne, to 2100
- ≈ $1,840 (Burke et al., Nature 2026)
- Dutch societal damage / year
- ~€130 billion (≈150 Mt at €875/tonne)
- What a fibre-crop farmer can earn
- €95–105 per tonne (LVVN pilot)
- Soil carbon, +1%
- ≈ €180 / hectare / year in extra yield
- Dutch CDR-tech export value, 2050
- ≈ €429 billion (CE Delft / TNO)
Counting it. Funding it.
Put a credible price on a removed tonne, and carbon finance becomes a way to finance the return of life into the economy — a kind of transition finance, moving money from extraction toward regeneration. But a price only works if a tonne can be trusted. That takes three steps:
Oncra — Open Natural Carbon Removal Accounting — is the Dutch system that runs this chain: it quantifies and certifies real removal across all four domains, in line with and as an implementation of the EU CRCF, and records every tonne on a public registry anyone can inspect. It is the calculation layer and the funding layer for everything on this page — the connecting link between the pioneers and the finance that can scale their work.
Oncra — the accounting layer for nature-based removal
It really is this simple
Store carbon in soils, seas, rocks and the things we build — and make room for life to come back. The science is settled, the policy is moving, and the pioneers are already at work. What it takes now is more of us: farmers, builders, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and neighbours, each helping to fill one of the four storehouses.
GO DEEPER
Watch & read
A library to go further — films, books, the cornerstone science, the EU rulebook, Dutch policy, and the best explainer for each domain. Tap a heading to open it.