Isometric is a carbon removal registry built to ensure the transition to carbon removal happens responsibly and fast.
The nascent market for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) needs to scale. That can only happen with the introduction of a new, trusted carbon registry to act as the foundation for the industry.
Traditional carbon registries are focused on credits that represent avoided emissions. This approach has lost the trust of academics and sophisticated buyers, and is not well-suited for the younger carbon removal market. The incumbents have actively resisted attempts to raise the bar, leading to an ecosystem that is expensive, analogue, error prone, opaque and rife with conflicts of interest.
The climate community has reached consensus that traditional carbon offset markets are broken, and some have called for the carbon markets to be disbanded entirely as we shift our focus to emissions reduction. Unfortunately, it’s too late to rely entirely on the energy transition. We must also aggressively pivot toward building a market for trusted CDR credits.
The growing CDR industry gives society an opportunity to build a new kind of carbon market: one where removals are verifiably additional. This pivot towards CDR is not optional, per scientific consensus.
There’s an urgent need for a new CDR focused carbon registry to support the scale up to gigatonnes.
Sophisticated buyers have started to mobilize behind the mission of creating a new market for CDR. And with new money flooding into the industry—including via the more than $1 billion Frontier Fund, which launched in 2022 with the participation of Alphabet, McKinsey, Meta, Stripe and Shopify, among others—carbon removal technology is bound to become more advanced and more accessible.
While the world is currently only removing a few kilotonnes of carbon annually, the industry needs to grow to at least 3.8 gigatonnes per year by 2050—and potentially three times larger—to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
As demand for CDR increases, the technologies will become more scalable and more affordable; once prices reach $100 per tonne, industry experts say CDR will be “affordable at the scale needed to make it a meaningful tool to reach net zero emissions.”
And there’s no time to waste. We need to ensure CDR scales efficiently, effectively, responsibly—and fast. Trust and transparency are crucial to achieving this scale.
The growth of the CDR market to date has been opportunistic and driven by the philanthropic efforts of large technology companies. Rather than use a trusted intermediary, the majority of these buyers of CDR have contracted with suppliers directly.
This relatively small group of buyers are largely doing their own up-front due diligence on projects by hiring in-house climate scientists (which can be expensive and near-impossible to scale) and spending millions of dollars with little way of knowing for sure that the CDR ever actually occurs. But this trust-based system is working well enough today because the ecosystem is small.