💡Missed yesterday´s European Union landmark meeting on Carbon Removal Certification (#CRCF)? 💡

A few observations from this historic meeting:

🔎 Scope: the European Commission laid out very clearly what is in vs out of scope. The framework itself - think certification criteria and rules - will be worked on by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. The EU Commission, and its Expert Group, will instead focus entirely on defining the right carbon dioxide removal (#cdr) methodologies.

⏳ Durability: it became apparent just how difficult it will be to create consensus around various removal methods. From #afforestation / #reforestation and #soilcarbon, to direct air capture (#dac) and biochar carbon removal (#bcr) - the sheer breadth of removal options is huge. Clearly, these have very different durability. Coming up with the right balance between options with high volume and low durability vs low volume and high durability will be very tricky, especially for the next 5-15 years.

🐘 Liability: to me, this is still the elephant in the room and something that was surprisingly not discussed - besides a valid question from Mark Preston Aragonès. It seems like the missing piece to manage the breadth of options mentioned above. Liability for #BECCS and #DACCS is largely dealt with by the #CCSDirective. For soil carbon we can also leverage the #LULUCF Regulation. But what about all other methods? Yesterday´s meeting did not shed more light on this crucial topic.

📆 Moving forward, there will be quarterly meetings in 2023 focused on specific sub-topics, starting with carbon farming on June 23rd followed by industrial removals in Q4. In 2024, more targeted sub-groups will be formed.

Finally, two more recommendations for the organisers moving forward:

👫 Gender balance: CDR boasts many incredible women (Eve Tamme, Frauke Kracke, Giana Amador just to name a few). It was a shame to see exclusively presentations by men for the majority of the day. The Commission is aware of this and mentioned it a few times throughout the day, but we should really make an effort to have an even gender balance for all presentations moving forward.

🙋‍♀️ Interaction with online audience: as one of the many people participating online, I noticed the great quality of questions in the Slido. Throughout the day, however, very few questions were actually surfaced by the moderators. For future events, I would encourage more interaction with the online audience.

That´s it - what a great kick-off to what will hopefully go down as the first and historic meeting to shape a regulation that will help us fight global warming and restore the climate. A big shout out to Christian Holzleitner, Fabien Ramos, and Valeria Forlin for hosting and moderating 🙏