The CDR Policy Scoop

In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Delia Meth-Cohn, Co-founder of Rethinking Removals, who has been part of the ISO Net Zero Aligned Organization Standard working group from its very first meeting, two years ago.

The conversation opens on why Delia got involved, recruited by the British Standards Institute to make sure removals expertise was in the room from the start. She explains what makes ISO structurally different from SBTi: where SBTi is a voluntary framework for leading, self-selecting companies, ISO is built to be globally applicable, rooted in national standards bodies and the WTO framework, and designed to accommodate countries with different net zero end dates, from Europe’s 2050 to China’s 2060 and Saudi Arabia’s 2070.

The discussion gets to the heart of what the standard actually does on removals: it makes the implicit removals target in net zero frameworks explicit. Companies setting a long-term reduction target must treat whatever remains as their “anticipated residual emissions”, and that figure becomes a removal target they are required to plan toward, with a validated first milestone within five years. Delia is clear that flexibility is intentional: the strategy can involve a portfolio of credits, removals within operations, or value chain approaches, so long as the trajectory is defensible and verified.

Sebastian pushes on the question of ambition and comparability: can two companies with very different removal strategies both receive the same ISO certification? Delia acknowledges the tension and closes on a call to action: the standard is currently in public consultation, comments feed through national standards bodies into the final draft, and this is the CDR community’s real window to push back on anything that falls short. The final standard is expected by mid-2027.

Links
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Delia Meth-Cohn: LinkedIn and Rethinking Removals
ISO Net Zero Aligned Organization Standard (public consultation)
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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Dr. Ruth Dagan, Senior Partner and Head of Environment & Climate Change at Herzog Law, and Co-Chair of the IETA Legal Working Group, to cover two legal challenges that are quietly suppressing corporate demand for carbon credits.

The first is litigation risk. Since 2022, climate washing claims have increased by seventy percent globally, with around 160 cases on the books and fifty-four relating specifically to carbon credit offsets. Apple's carbon neutral Watch campaign was lost in Germany and only tentatively won in the US. The upshot is that many companies are choosing to say nothing about their climate action at all. Ruth calls this green-hushing, and argues it is actively draining demand from the voluntary carbon market.

The conversation covers the two regulatory responses now taking shape: the EU Empowering Consumers Directive, coming into force in September, which blacklists product-level carbon neutrality claims outright, and California's AB 1911, which proposes the opposite, a safe harbor that would actively protect companies using high-integrity credits. Ruth outlines the work being led by IETA and the Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets, now backed by eleven governments.

The second challenge is more fundamental: most carbon credit registries, including PACM, include explicit disclaimers that they make no legal statement about who actually owns the credits in an account. Ruth explains how this came to be, what it means for institutional investment, and how the Unidroit project, due to conclude in early 2027, offers a route to resolution.

Links
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Dr. Ruth Dagan: LinkedIn and Profile
Empowering Consumers Directive
California AB 1911
Coalition to Grow Carbon Markets / IETA safe harbor report
Grantham Institute Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation

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Guest: Robert Höglund, writer of Marginal Carbon, climate strategist at Milkywire, and co-founder of CDI FYI

The Science Based Targets initiative has released its long-awaited Net Zero Standard, and Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme wasted no time pulling Robert Höglund, climate strategist at Milkywire, and co-founder of CDR.FYI back onto the show to work through what it actually means for CDR.

The three begin with a verdict: mostly neutral. Better than the previous draft, some of the more damaging provisions are gone, but the standard falls short of what the CDR community had hoped for. With the key requirement for carbon removal pegged to 2035, the central question is whether anything meaningful happens in the nine years between now and then.

The conversation works through the specific wins and losses. Corresponding adjustments are no longer a hard requirement, now encouraged and reported, which Robert and Eve both consider a workable compromise. The "like for like" principle survived. Scope 3 was included, which significantly raises the ceiling on potential CDR demand. But the standard leaves key questions unanswered: what emissions are companies actually supposed to counterbalance with CDR, their physical inventory or their residual after market measures? The answer, Robert notes, could be "quite controversial."

The episode closes on what comes next: the call for evidence on short-lived removals, the incoming ISO standard, and a probable 2031 timeline for the next full version of the standard, leaving the industry to watch carefully what happens in the interim guidance documents that can still reshape how the standard is applied in practice.

Links
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Robert Höglund: LinkedIn, Website and Substack
SBTi Net Zero Standard

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Recorded live at the Negative Emissions Platform (NEP) event in June 2026, this fireside chat brings Sebastian Manhart together with Oliver Geden for a rapid-fire sweep through the state of CDR policy.

Oliver Geden is Head of the Research Cluster on Climate and Energy Policy at SWP (the German Institute for International and Security Affairs), Vice Chair of IPCC Working Group Three, and a member of the executive team of the State of CDR Report. He co-authored Chapter Five on policy in the report's third edition, published the week this conversation was recorded.

Together they dig into the questions that matter, the numbers that mislead, and the politics underneath both. In 30 minutes they cover a lot of ground: the policy sequencing debate, what the 16% CDR share of global mitigation effort actually means, and which countries are pulling ahead.

Oliver walks through why over 100 countries now have net zero targets, yet novel CDR features in only two NDCs through to 2035, Australia and the UK, and in around one-third of long-term strategies for 2050. He draws on his IPCC experience to explain the shift in how CDR has been framed in intergovernmental negotiations: from "scenarios suggest you'll need it" to "you cannot reach net zero without it." That shift forecloses the option of treating CDR as an optional add-on, but it hasn't yet translated into concrete national planning at scale.

The conversation gets into the weeds on EU policy design: the complexity of introducing national durable removal targets within the pillar system, the tension in the international credits debate between what the text says and what policymakers are actually trying to achieve, and a concept Oliver introduces that is worth holding onto: "politically hard to abate." The episode closes on a question that would have felt out of place a year ago: what the war in Iran does to climate and CDR policy ambition, and Oliver's answer is, characteristically, clear-eyed.

Show notes:
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Oliver Geden: LinkedIn
State of CDR Report, 3rd Edition:
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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme dig into the highly anticipated third edition of the State of CDR Report.

At 300 pages and 75-plus authors, this edition is the most comprehensive mapping of the CDR landscape to date. Sebastian and Eve don't attempt to walk through the headlines they go deeper, pulling out the findings that stood out, challenged assumptions, or raised new questions.

The conversation opens on vocabulary: the report's case for retiring "natural versus technological" in favour of "conventional versus novel", and why that framing matters for how CDR is perceived by the public. It then turns to one of the report's most important, and most easily misread, numbers: the 2.2 gigatons of global CDR, of which 99.9% is conventional and 2.1 megatons is novel. Sebastian unpacks why gross versus net removals is not a semantic debate, and why the two figures are measuring fundamentally different things.

From there, they cover the gap: what NDCs and long-term strategies actually say (and don't say) about CDR, why a new wave of national climate plans arrived with almost no additional detail on removals, and what the report's modelling implies about how much CDR net zero will actually require, with the average across scenarios now sitting at 16% of mitigation effort, not the 10% commonly cited. They also take a hard look at the 2030 outlook: the report's layered approach to projections, why the 2020 prediction of 11 megatons by 2025 became 2, and what company announcements of 42 megatons actually mean in practice.

The episode closes on what the next decade of CDR delivery really looks like: biomass-based methods dominating through 2030, a CDR funding share of just 2.6% of all climate tech, and a shout-out to CDRjobs, which gets its first dedicated section in the report, for contributing workforce data to the ecosystem.

Show notes:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
State of CDR Report 2026
CDRjobs
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