Carbon dioxide removal is essential to meeting our climate goals. The science is clear, and policymakers from California to Brussels are acting on it. What remains contested is how to ensure that carbon removal credits actually deliver the climate impact they promise, not just when they’re issued, but for as long as policy requires.
That’s the question at the heart of the paper we’re publishing today with RMI and the American Forest Foundation: Contracted Durability: A Framework for Performance-Based Carbon Removal.
The problem with how we manage durability today
When carbon is stored, whether in a forest, in soil, or in geological formations, there’s always some risk it gets released back into the atmosphere. Managing this “reversal risk” is one of the most debated topics in carbon markets, as market actors seek to improve its integrity.
Current approaches have proven insufficient to date. Some policies set durability standards so high that only a narrow set of removal pathways qualify, locking out nature-based solutions that are cost-effective, scalable, deployable today, and essential to near-term climate goals. Others have been more inclusive but haven’t ensured that credits represent carbon stored for the full duration that policy requires — leaving a gap in which reversals go unmonitored and uncompensated.
These approaches fall short of what the market needs: a framework that holds all credits to a rigorous standard without excluding the pathways we need most.
A different way of thinking about durability
The framework we’re introducing — contracted durability — starts from a simple premise: it shouldn’t be the type of carbon removal project alone that determines whether a credit is durable. What matters is whether clear legal and financial mechanisms are in place to assign ongoing liability and compensate if stored carbon is later released.
Under this approach, a reforestation project and a direct air capture project can meet the same durability threshold, not because they store carbon the same way, but because both have enforceable mechanisms guaranteeing the climate impact of the credit for the required duration. The cost of covering reversal risk scales with that risk, so lower-risk projects pay less and higher-risk projects pay more. What changes is that every pathway can qualify on the same terms, rather than being admitted or barred by category.
Why this matters right now
Five major policy and standard-setting processes are actively writing durability rules this year: California, the EU, Article 6.4, SBTi, and ICVCM. The choices made in this window will determine which carbon removal pathways gain access to markets, which receive investment signals, and ultimately how we can deploy carbon removal at the scale required to meet climate goals.
Contracted durability isn’t a finished product. It requires further research, institutional design, and real-world piloting. But the direction is clear, and the policy window is open to foster innovation in the market.
Read the full paper here