What we do

We search out and build the interventions that bring life back — and, in bringing life back, store carbon. We work at the level of systems, alongside the entrepreneurs already doing it, and we create new forms for an economy that runs on life.

A conscious force for life

For four billion years life on this planet has been making itself — for almost all of that time without knowing it. Then a species arrived that can understand how living systems work and model their own future. Through us, life can begin to do on purpose what it has always done by accident: bring itself back. That is the work — to be a conscious force for life on a planet that needs one.

Carbon is our measure. When life returns — in forests and soils, in wetlands and seas, in the very materials we build with — carbon comes out of the air and back into the living world. So we look for the places where life can return at scale, and we build what is missing so that it can: the methods, the markets, the tools, the coalitions. We work systemically. We work with entrepreneurs. And we keep inventing new forms for a living economy.

New to all this? Start with our primer — Nature-based carbon removal, explained — or read the full strategy in our green paper. Below are the interventions themselves: the work we are running now, and the foundations we built earlier.

Ongoing

Currently running

Oncra

Open Natural Carbon Removal Accounting — the missing link between the people who remove carbon with nature and the finance that should reward them. Oncra certifies real, measurable removal across land, ocean, rock and construction, open and free for removers, and is moving to become recognised infrastructure under the EU CRCF.

Go to Oncra

Construction Stored Carbon

The world's first open certification for carbon stored in buildings. Bio-based materials — wood, hemp, bamboo, mycelium — turn the built environment into a carbon sink, and CSC certificates let that storage be valued and financed. In 2025 it became a working market, with the first credits auctioned and traded.

Learn more

Ocean Stored Carbon

A certification protocol and financial metric for nature-based ocean removal — mangroves, seagrass and seaweed. Developed with the WWF INNO-fonds, it lets entrepreneurs quantify and monetise the blue carbon they restore, without competing for land.

Learn more

Sargassum seaweed gathered on the Yucatán coast

Golden Tides

Ocean carbon removal on the Yucatán coast of Mexico. With Oceanus International we intercept floating Sargassum seaweed before it beaches and help it sink naturally into the deep ocean — where most of it ends up anyway — turning a coastal blight into measurable blue carbon, accounted through Oncra. An early-stage pilot, honest about the frontier it is on.

About Golden Tides

ABC Interreg partners gathered at the Province of Gelderland

ABC Interreg — Agro Building Carbon

A four-year Interreg Europe project (2025–2029) connecting regenerative agriculture with bio-based construction across nine European regions. The Province of Gelderland leads; we are advisory partner, contributing Oncra as the Dutch good-practice method to exchange. Explore the open data app at abcdex.eu.

About the project

Two people in a nature-inclusive Dutch farm field with crop strips and wildflower margins

Koolstofopbrengst

Carbon Yield — a free tool for Dutch farmers and landowners. Click your parcel on the map and see the carbon you could store by shifting to nature-inclusive, regenerative farming or bio-based construction crops — and how that transition can be financed by valuing the storage through Oncra. Built with the Province of Gelderland, alongside the ABC agro-carbon work.

Visit koolstofopbrengst.nl

Nationale Top — natural carbon sequestration summit

Nationale Top & CDR Conference

Every year we convene the people building the new nature economy. Our annual CDR Conference brings carbon-removal finance, policy and entrepreneurs to Amsterdam; in June 2026 the national summit on natural carbon sequestration gathers policymakers, entrepreneurs, scientists and financiers around a life-based economy.

To the summit

Levenswerkplaats — the Life Workshop

An open maker-space and lab on the square beside the Poortgebouw at Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam-Noord — "a permanent hackathon for bringing life back." The continuation of our Natural Climate Solutions Lab: experiments with seaweed biostimulants, biochar and olivine rock-meal as soil improvers, and bamboo as a building material. Doors open, coffee on.

Step inside

Klimaatlegaat

Climate Legacy — leave the living world better than you found it by remembering nature and climate in your will. A guide and a personal intake help turn a legacy into lasting regeneration.

Visit klimaatlegaat.nl

Nature-based carbon removal, explained

New to this? Our primer on the second half of the climate solution: why carbon is a proxy for life, the four storage domains — land, ocean, rock and construction — and how removal gets measured, certified and paid for.

Start here

History

Earlier interventions & foundations

These interventions did their work, shaped how we think, or have run their course. We keep them here because they are part of the story — and because their ideas still run through everything above.

Drawdown

The first comprehensive plan to reverse global warming. We published Paul Hawken's bestseller in Dutch and co-founded Drawdown Europe — part of the scientific underpinning of our work.

Regeneration

Putting life central to everything we do. With a broad coalition of partners we brought Paul Hawken's Regeneration to the Netherlands and help nourish the movement it describes.

2040

Damon Gameau's uplifting documentary — Drawdown and Doughnut Economics brought to the screen — picturing a regenerative world in 2040 and positively activating people into climate action.

Watch trailer & read more

Donometer

A decision-making tool, built with the Digital Society School at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, that connects Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics to real-world value chains.

4th Global Enhanced Weathering Conference

May 4th, 2022, live from Amsterdam and online — scientists and entrepreneurs on enhanced weathering, one of the oldest scalable natural climate solutions.

Programme & talks

Sargassum Cleanup Feasibility Study

In 2021, with WWF Netherlands, MIIP and Stinapa, we went to the Caribbean and collected and dried Sargassum seaweed by hand — to learn whether it can remove carbon at scale. This is what we found.

Download study

See a way to collaborate?

Every intervention started as a conversation. If you find a way to work together — as a remover, builder, funder, scientist or neighbour — reach out.