Global cooperation on CDR can help governments share risk, align policy, and scale carbon-dioxide removal faster than any one country working alone.

This post originally appeared on CDRANet’s website.

Author: Glenn Hampson, Founder and Director at CDRANet

For much of the modern era, global cooperation on environmental challenges has been a cornerstone of international diplomacy. From the Montreal Protocol’s phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals to regional efforts on air pollution and acid rain, the world has proven time and again that working together can deliver meaningful results for our environment.

Yet over the past few decades, most climate policy has focused on reducing carbon emissions to combat global warming, rather than considering all the approaches necessary to meet this challenge. Chief among these overlooked approaches is carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—identified as essential in every IPCC report since the early 1990s, yet still treated as being too politically fraught, or an approach best left for markets to develop.

Today, we can no longer afford to leave CDR behind. Global emissions continue to rise, Paris Agreement pledges have fallen short, and global warming may have already surpassed critical thresholds. Meanwhile, current models show that our CDR capacity must scale from a few thousand tons today to 7–9 billion tons annually by 2050—likely sooner, given current warming trends.

Global collaboration on CDR offers both practical and moral advantages. It reduces duplication by pooling research and infrastructure; accelerates innovation; harmonizes standards for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV); and enables financing mechanisms that can achieve economies of scale. It also broadens ownership, spreads responsibility and benefits fairly, and prevents a new wave of “carbon colonialism” where wealthy nations extract resource from poorer ones. Working together on CDR also gives us another tool for reaching net-zero quickly, an important milestone in our fight against global warming.

Lessons from early collaborations

A handful of cross-border projects already show what coordinated CDR can look like in practice. In Europe, Northern Lights—the world’s first cross-border CO₂ storage network—brings together Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies to store emissions from across the continent, with Poland joining on research and permitting. In the Caribbean, UK researchers working with Dominican partners through the nonprofit Vesta are testing whether crushed minerals on beaches can safely enhance ocean alkalinity. Germany and Israel’s long-standing German–Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development offers another model of durable cooperation, showing how stable funding and trust can sustain collaboration across generations.

Broader initiatives are also gaining momentum. The Mission Innovation CDR Mission, co-led by the US, Canada, and Saudi Arabia, aims to remove 100 million tons of CO₂ per year by 2030, while the Carbon Management Challenge—announced at COP28—has rallied 23 countries to expand carbon-management capacity to a gigaton annually. Private-sector deals, such as Microsoft’s partnerships with Climeworks and 1PointFive, are anchoring a commercial market for verified removals. And in the Global South, reforestation in Brazil and Amazonia and blue-carbon restoration in Australia, Indonesia, and Tanzania demonstrate how ecological and economic co-benefits can align through shared monitoring and finance.

The wider web of cooperation

Beyond formal treaties and projects, a vast network of organizations is already building the “soft infrastructure” of global CDR. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) and Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI) are setting governance standards for quality and transparency, while Verra, Gold Standard, and Puro.earth now certify engineered removals alongside nature-based credits. Technical committees within ISO are defining MRV norms that could soon underpin international carbon accounting.

Financial and transparency frameworks are also converging. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the IFRS Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), and the OECD’s export-credit guidelines are embedding carbon removal into lending, disclosure, and procurement rules. Meanwhile, platforms such as the Carbon Credit Quality Initiative (CCQI), the World Bank Climate Warehouse, CDR.fyi, CarbonPlan, and the OpenAir Collective are sharing open data and methodologies to compare cost, permanence, and impact. Together, these efforts form a decentralized but rapidly maturing governance ecosystem—a web of standards and norms that is already global in scope.

These same networks can also help bridge the investment and implementation gap that stalls early projects. By standardizing risk metrics, sharing validation data, and providing transparent crediting frameworks, they are quietly creating the conditions needed to unlock larger-scale finance and accelerate first-of-a-kind (FOAK) deployment worldwide.

The ecosystem of collaboration

Beyond governments and markets, a dynamic constellation of coalitions, research hubs, funders, and conveners is shaping how CDR scales in practice. Advocacy and research groups such as Carbon180, RMI, UPTAKE, the Direct Air Capture Coalition, and university centers like Oxford’s CO₂RE and CarbFix link scientists, policymakers, and industry in a shared search for scalable solutions. Major funders—including the European Climate Foundation, Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Climeworks Foundation, and the Frontier Fund (Stripe Climate)—are channeling billions into early-stage research, infrastructure, and procurement. Prizes such as the XPRIZE Carbon Removal have further accelerated innovation and visibility.

Annual gatherings—Climate Week NYC, Carbon Unbound, and regional CDR summits—offer spaces for governments, startups, and financiers to align agendas. The Carbon Dioxide Removal Action Network (CDRANet), through its forthcoming Vancouver Declaration, is helping unite these streams under a common vision of responsible, government-led cooperation. Across sectors, organizations like Mission Innovation, the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition, and the Carbon Removal Alliance are connecting corporate buyers with credible supply, translating policy ambition into market demand.

This plural ecosystem is messy by design but vital in function. It supplies experimentation, legitimacy, and political cover that formal diplomacy often lacks. If these efforts can converge around shared research priorities, risk-sharing frameworks, and infrastructure corridors, they could collectively overcome many of the same barriers now stalling national-scale progress.

Risks and realities

Cross-border CDR is technically feasible but institutionally fragile. Few nations have clear liability regimes for transboundary CO₂ storage or harmonized permanence metrics, and MRV systems remain uneven. Inconsistent policy support—exemplified by the US DOE’s 2025 hub cancellations—further undermines investor confidence.

Even where technologies are proven, first-of-a-kind projects remain prohibitively risky. High upfront costs, long permitting timelines, and uncertain revenue streams discourage private investment without coordinated public backing. This is where international cooperation becomes most critical: shared risk-pooling, joint procurement, and standardized crediting can give investors the predictability they need to fund early large-scale plants. Public guarantees or green development banks could bridge financing gaps until commercial markets mature.

Infrastructure poses another systemic hurdle. Cross-border pipelines, shipping routes, and storage basins require aligned safety standards, permitting, and public engagement—areas where national rules still diverge sharply. Collaborative planning, modeled on transnational energy grids and LNG networks, could cut years off deployment while distributing costs more equitably.

Finally, coordination on research and data remains uneven. Many governments still fund CDR innovation in isolation, duplicating effort and slowing global learning. Shared testbeds, open data platforms, and joint validation centers would strengthen transparency, while harmonized MRV protocols, liability pools, and independent technical oversight must anchor trust.

Still, the realities are these: without more robust global coordination soon on CDR—particularly at the government level—climate conditions will only worsen, and the world will be left spending trillions each year adapting to an increasingly hostile environment. Working together now to build a more active and coherent global framework for CDR isn’t just smart policy—it’s essential policy for protecting our shared future. We’ve always been stronger working together; CDR is no different.