ClimeFi & World Ocean Council: Scaling Marine CDR For Climate & Biodiversity - CleanTechnica

The article highlights the growing interest in marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) as a crucial strategy for addressing climate change and supporting biodiversity. Oceans naturally absorb about 30% of human CO₂ emissions and store significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, offering advantages over land-based carbon removal methods by avoiding competition with agriculture and urban areas. Various mCDR techniques, such as seaweed farming and electrochemical CO₂ removal, can operate offshore or near coastal infrastructure, providing scalable and less land-constrained solutions. Additionally, many mCDR approaches bring ecological benefits like reducing ocean acidification and enhancing marine habitats, though some methods carry risks such as trace metal introduction or harmful algal blooms, which ongoing research aims to mitigate. A key challenge for mCDR is robust measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) due to the ocean’s complex dynamics, making carbon quantification more difficult than on land. However, progress is being made with new protocols and standards developed by organizations like Isometric, Carbon