Determining the Viability of Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal: Building a Collective Strategy to Prioritize Research, Development, and Demonstration
The climate solutions world is at a critical inflection point; we need to accelerate our research to determine which solutions are viable and which can scale.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is crucial to meeting international climate agreements and ensuring a safe climate for existing and future generations. Helpfully, there has been significant growth in awareness and engagement with CDR and marine CDR (mCDR) during the past five years.
MCDR is a nascent portfolio of potential strategies that mimic and enhance the natural power of the ocean to cycle carbon out of the atmosphere and transform it into inert forms sequestered in the deep sea. If proven effective and safe, mCDR approaches could be deployed to help achieve the carbon dioxide removals the world needs to counterbalance hard-to-abate emissions, and achieve net zero climate goals. Recently, more people from academia, start-ups, government, and other sectors are entering the mCDR field – advancing vital work in areas such as applied research, policy, financial mechanisms, governance, and technology development.
To date, however, these activities have been relatively disconnected, with inconsistent coordination and collaboration across the field, thereby limiting synergistic efforts and creating challenges in developing the field quickly and strategically, which is critical to meeting the urgency of the moment.
Accordingly, and together with partners, Ocean Visions is facilitating the development of a collective five-year strategy to coordinate and prioritize actions that address the most critical uncertainties for mCDR as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Foundation Setting
In late 2024, Ocean Visions, in partnership with the Carbon Technology Research Foundation, began the development of a collective strategy for the mCDR field. The goal? Build a unified five-year strategy that, if executed, would produce a level of evidence sufficient for policymakers and society to make decisions about the use of mCDR approaches. This goal requires identifying and agreeing on a clear set of critical priorities and core actions to achieve them, and then fostering aligned efforts among mCDR actors to focus on these priorities and actions.
Through the spring of 2025, more than 150 actors in the mCDR field contributed their insights to this effort through a process that included interviews and workshops as well as extensive literature review. The resulting foundational report lays the groundwork for building the collective strategy.
The Path Ahead
Since the collective strategy project began there have been seismic shifts in the funding and political realities for climate work—most acutely in the U.S. context. These shifts heighten the imperative for the mCDR field to act more strategically and collaboratively. Ocean Visions’ next steps toward completing this collective strategy are:
- Identify specific proposed actions and strategies that best address the highest priority areas of collective action identified in the report.
- Develop five-year objectives and provisional milestones.
- Engage mCDR field leaders and practitioners to review the strategy draft and suggest refinements.
- Share the draft strategy with the mCDR field for broad input.
- Build engagement and working groups for specific action areas or workstreams with key actors in the mCDR field, and adjacent fields, using the draft findings from the emerging collective strategy.
This is a project of Ocean Visions in collaboration with The Carbon Technology Research Foundation (CTRF) and other partners. CTRF is a non-profit, philanthropic entity with a mission to invest in the power of technology to supercharge natural systems and catalyze further funding, research, and solutions.
