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First-generation REDD+ projects, the flagship forest conservation credits traded on the voluntary carbon market, claimed 10.7 times more avoided deforestation than independent evaluations actually support. That’s not a rounding error. That’s an order-of-magnitude gap between what was sold and what was delivered. Why it matters REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) credits have been one of the most popular categories on the voluntary carbon market for years. Companies buy them to offset their emissions, trusting that the credits represent real tons of CO₂ kept out of the atmosphere. If those credits are inflated by a factor of nearly 11, it means a huge volume of claimed climate benefit simply didn’t happen. For anyone working in CDR or nature-based climate solutions, this finding is a flashing warning sign about how baselines and counterfactuals get constructed, and how easily they can go wrong. ...

JPMorganChase has purchased more than 85,000 metric tons of premium carbon dioxide removal credits from Anew Climate and Aurora Sustainable Lands, using what’s known as a dynamic baseline methodology. It’s one of the larger single CDR credit transactions to surface recently, and the “dynamic baseline” label signals a push toward higher-integrity accounting in nature-based carbon markets. Why it matters Voluntary carbon markets have spent the last two years under intense scrutiny. The core criticism: many forestry and land-use credits overstate their climate benefit because they measure carbon removal against a static, often inflated baseline. A dynamic baseline adjusts over time to reflect changing conditions, making it harder to claim credit for carbon that would have been stored anyway. When a buyer the size of JPMorganChase puts real money behind this methodology, it sends a clear signal about where credit quality standards are heading. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR market is building the plumbing faster than ever. But the one customer who was paying for most of what flows through it just stopped writing checks. Microsoft has paused all carbon removal purchases, according to reporting from Carbon Herald and Heatmap News. This is not a minor procurement hiccup. Microsoft has been responsible for roughly 90% of global durable CDR demand. When a market has one buyer and that buyer freezes, you don’t have a slowdown. You have a structural crisis. ...

Concrete is quietly becoming CDR’s most promising delivery vehicle. That is the pattern running through today’s news, and it matters more than any single headline. The day concrete got serious about carbon removal Three separate stories landed today pointing in the same direction: carbon mineralization in concrete is moving from lab curiosity to industrial reality. ZEN Carbon announced its first live deployment at a concrete plant. CarbonCure won the 2026 Climate Technology Company of the Year award. And ETH Zurich published work on a living building material that captures CO2 and can self-repair. ...

Cella has signed a research and technology collaboration with TotalEnergies to test its in situ mineralization platform for evaluating CO2 storage potential at industrial sites. The partnership covers the full workflow: site screening, injection design, and monitoring. It’s a notable signal that mineralization-based storage is getting serious attention from one of the world’s largest energy companies. Why it matters Most carbon storage conversations focus on injecting CO2 into deep saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas reservoirs, where the gas stays trapped but remains as CO2 for long periods. In situ mineralization takes a different approach. It aims to convert injected CO2 into solid carbonate minerals within the rock itself, locking the carbon away permanently. If Cella’s platform can reliably screen industrial sites for this kind of storage and then guide injection and monitoring, it could open up storage options that don’t depend on traditional geological traps. The fact that TotalEnergies, through its Carbon to Value (C2V) Initiative, is investing research effort here suggests the major energy players see mineralization as more than a lab curiosity. They want to know if it works at real industrial facilities. ...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have created a construction material that is alive, captures CO2, and can repair itself. If it works at scale, it would turn buildings from carbon sources into carbon sinks, merging structural function with carbon removal in a single product. Why it matters The built environment is responsible for roughly 37% of global CO2 emissions when you count both construction and operation. Concrete alone accounts for about 8% of worldwide emissions. A material that absorbs carbon dioxide while serving as a structural component would attack the problem from both sides: reducing the emissions footprint of construction and actively pulling CO2 from the air over the building’s lifetime. That is a fundamentally different proposition from simply making concrete “less bad.” ...

Triodos Investment Management and Fondaction Asset Management have launched Value Nature Fund I, a €300 million closed-end fund that aims to convert farmland and forests to regenerative practices across Europe, Canada, and the United States. What makes this fund unusual: part of the manager’s performance-based pay will be tied directly to hitting biodiversity and climate impact targets, not just financial returns. Why it matters Natural capital investing has long been treated as a niche corner of sustainable finance, often associated with small pilot projects or grant-funded conservation. A €300 million target with institutional structure, a dual-continent strategy, and an intended Article 9 classification under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (the highest sustainability category for investment products) signals something different. This fund is being packaged as a real-assets vehicle meant to attract larger pools of capital into land-use transition. For CDR, the relevance is clear. Regenerative agriculture and closer-to-nature forestry are among the primary land-based pathways for removing and storing carbon. Scaling these practices requires exactly the kind of institutional capital this fund is designed to mobilize. But the usual caveat applies: land-based carbon removal addresses residual emissions that can’t be eliminated through decarbonization. It is not a substitute for cutting fossil fuel use. ...

CarbonCure Technologies took home the Climate Technology Company of the Year title at the 2026 CleanTech Breakthrough Awards. The Canada-based company earned the recognition for its approach to CO2 mineralization in concrete, a process that locks carbon dioxide into one of the world’s most widely used building materials. Why it matters Concrete production is responsible for roughly 8% of global CO2 emissions. Most CDR conversations focus on direct air capture or ocean-based approaches, but mineralization in concrete offers something different: it permanently stores CO2 in a product people are already buying in massive quantities. An industry award like this signals growing mainstream recognition that carbon utilization in building materials is a serious piece of the removal and reduction puzzle. ...

A new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) finds that folding CDR into the EU Emissions Trading System could deliver roughly 60 million tonnes of CO₂ removals per year by 2050. The researchers propose a phased approach, with full integration of removal credits and residual emissions under a single carbon price arriving around 2040. If the design holds, Europe’s carbon market would shift from merely capping pollution to actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR sector is panicking about losing credit buyers. Meanwhile, the most resilient carbon removal companies don’t need them, because they’re selling concrete, pavement, and insulation. This is the split that matters right now. While the voluntary carbon market wobbles and major buyers hit pause, a parallel track of CDR is quietly embedding itself into physical products that people already purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with climate guilt. It is happening across biochar, mineralization, and CO₂ utilization at the same time. And it changes the economics of carbon removal in ways the credit-obsessed conversation is missing. ...