Almost everyone in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) community believes that policy is necessary to deploy CDR at scale. But “scaling” isn’t the ultimate goal. In a new report, we step back to consider what it would take to purposefully orient CDR policy efforts towards enabling a net-negative world. Net negativity is a familiar justification for CDR funding. However, we think that taking it seriously has surprising implications for which technologies to support, how to design policy mechanisms, and how to account for what policies achieve.
CDR holds the promise of being uniquely useful to a world that has already deeply decarbonized. In that context, CDR could neutralize residual emissions to stabilize global temperatures, or draw additional CO₂ out of the atmosphere to lower temperatures. However, the kind of comprehensive, complex policy efforts that are necessary for deep decarbonization have not yet materialized. This helps explain why a robust CDR policy framework for enabling net negativity hasn’t either.
In the absence of such a framework, early CDR development has largely taken place in the offsets market, where early-stage companies raise revenue through the sale of carbon credits. This history matters because it shapes the way that the CDR field conceives of the role of public policy. Many policy conversations inherit assumptions from the market, resulting in a discourse that orients towards minting ton-denominated credits to enable offsetting claims, rather than towards what net negativity requires.
Our new report seeks to reorient the policy conversation towards the fundamental goal of enabling a net-negative world, asking what needs to be true of policy efforts in order for them to achieve this goal.
Setting neutralization and drawdown as our aims can have surprising implications for policy design. For example, consider the question of which real-world activities policymakers should support. Not every activity that stores atmospheric carbon can deliver drawdown capacity in the future. Some CDR activities rely on broader systems that are either unlikely to exist in a net-negative world, or unlikely to decarbonize sufficiently for the activity’s removals to outstrip the system emissions that enable it. Differentiating between activities that are likely to deliver neutralization, drawdown, both, or neither is therefore critical for policymakers seeking to build a portfolio of technologies capable of enabling net negativity.
In the report, we present a framework for identifying the different categories of carbon fluxes associated with a given activity, as well as a decision tree for understanding which roles an activity could play in CDR policy efforts. We present similar tools for thinking creatively about which policy mechanisms could bring a portfolio of CDR activities to maturity — recognizing each activity’s developmental needs and future roles — and for understanding the quantification and accounting standards that distinct policies demand.
This report is more theoretical than a typical policy white paper. Rather than evaluating the status quo and proposing specific recommendations for regulatory and legislative improvements, it grapples with questions like: What is the purpose of CDR policy? How much do we need to know about residual emissions in order to make effective policy? Where is the line between science and policy in CDR standards? However, instead of answering these questions in isolation or prescribing definitive solutions, we organize our thinking into a framework to help policymakers navigate them systematically.
We imagine two primary types of users of this report. The first is policymakers of the future. Our hope is that, before too long, the politics of deep decarbonization will improve, and with it, the prospects for CDR policies that drive towards a net-negative world. We intend this report as a resource to anyone who may, one day, be in a position to design those policies. The second audience includes those working within today’s more constrained policy environment. To the extent that limited public funds or opportunities for advancing CDR development exist, now and in the near future, we hope the report can be a tool for making the most of those resources.
This report is a first attempt to grapple with some tricky questions about the best strategy for moving a diverse set of early-stage CDR technologies towards a world in which they effectively enable net negativity. We assume that there are many areas for improvement, or entirely different ways of approaching the issues. Please share your reactions and feedback – we’d love to talk.
The full report is available as a PDF in two versions: dark mode and light mode.
Please cite as:
Chris Allen et al., Recentering goals: A guide to CDR policymaking for a net-negative world (Feb. 2026).