Early lessons from Microsoft's climate push

"Although these are just two companies’ efforts, they are the first significant open solicitations focused exclusively on carbon removal," they note.

What they found: One takeaway is that supply of viable removal services is still very limited if you want to ensure the CO2 stays sequestered.

• Microsoft received 189 proposals offering 154 megatonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) removal in coming years, but just a third was immediately available and just 2 MtCO2 met their "high quality" criteria.
• Another lesson: The young sector needs consistent standards and definitions around measuring, verifying and reporting removal. "Such ambiguity is a barrier to investment," they write.

What's next: The analysis offers recommendations for growing and improving the market for services like forestry and other nature-based systems and nascent direct air capture tech.

• For instance, they note that multiple approaches have been floated to standardize definitions, yet "these comparisons hinge on choices of a few parameters, such as economic rates."
• "Factors such as competition for land use, limits to ecosystem-carrying capacity and social and environmental impacts need to be accounted for."