2025 was my first year back in carbon removal, and it turned out to be the perfect year for a return. Between San Francisco Climate Week, Singapore Ecosperity Week, NYC Climate Week, and more dinners, happy hours, and brunches than I can count, the past 12 months offered endless conversations with buyers, developers, policymakers, and peers.

What stood out most was how human the field feels globally, both fast-moving and incredibly slow at the same time, and grounded in people trading lessons over coffee, wine, and late-night lobby chats.

And across continents, events, and informal gatherings, a consistent picture emerged:

Carbon removal is maturing globally, unevenly, collaboratively, and is bursting with creativity even as it contends with real bottlenecks.

Here’s what this past year made clear.

1. A global market evolving along multiple maturity curves

Coming back into the field, I saw buyers falling into three broad groups - and often shifting between them.

One-off explorers

Still buying individual tonnes, piloting technologies, and building internal confidence. These buyers are essential: they fuel early suppliers, signal emerging demand, and keep innovation moving.

Portfolio architects

Running structured RFPs, building multi-year procurement plans, and assembling diversified portfolios that blend technologies, geographies, and risk profiles. Their strategies increasingly hinge on strong monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) as well as transparency and traceability.

Everyone in between

• Companies sampling the menu and starting to plan their next course.
• Teams experimenting locally while aiming to scale globally.
• Climate leaders juggling urgency with education and internal due diligence demands.

A major insight from a couple major climate weeks:
Corporate teams are under mounting pressure to defend every choice.
Not just why they buy removals, but why these removals, with what evidence, and backed by which verification.

This is pushing even earlier-stage buyers toward clearer, more trusted, more traceable pathways long before they’re ready for full-scale, formal procurement cycles. For suppliers and project developers, this means investing in transparent, high-quality tracking, clear durability and risk communication, and trusted distribution channels much earlier, as buyers now expect institutional-grade credibility and traceability even before entering formal procurement cycles.

2. Policy turbulence shaped the year but didn’t stall buyers

By January 2025, most people expected a chaotic U.S. policy landscape, and it delivered exactly that.

Federal uncertainty

• Evolving 45Q guidance, slow permitting reform, and mixed federal signals made long-term planning hard.
• Developers adapted through contingency planning; buyers adapted by diversifying geographically.

State momentum… followed by setbacks

Several states proposed exciting procurement pilots and incentive frameworks, only to see a few vetoes late in the process. They weren’t catastrophic, but didn’t produce the policy signals or procurement authority many hoped for.

Importantly:

Buyers didn’t pause because of policy setbacks.
The setbacks just didn’t accelerate the market the way strong state action could have.

Behind the scenes, states continue to push forward anyway, iterating legislation, workshopping procurement pathways, and looking for budget levers to support removals in future cycles.

My conversations during Ecosperity Week in Singapore drove home another reality:

“U.S. uncertainty is Asia’s opportunity.”

Singapore, in particular, is emerging as a coordination hub bringing together finance, talent, and governance in a deliberate, ambitious way. It’s a reminder that carbon removal leadership is now truly global.

3. Project execution is the challenge

Across North America, Europe, and Asia, developers shared nearly identical concerns, underscoring that the biggest obstacles are operational, not ideological.

Operational readiness remains hard

• Long engineering timelines
• Complex integrations
• Equipment bottlenecks
• First/early of it’s kind (FOAK/EOAK) surprises

Funding gaps persist

• Capital flows slowly
• Costs accumulate quickly
• A global Catch-22: Financing often requires offtake, while offtake often requires financing

MRV → verification → issuance still slows things down

• Developers want to deliver
• Buyers want to receive
• The system in the middle still creates drag

Delays compound

Even small logistical, verification, engineering, or community steps can stretch timelines by months.

This influenced buyer behavior everywhere:

No single project or geography can meet corporate needs reliably.
Portfolios aren’t a luxury, they’re risk management.

This global understanding is why almost every buyer conversation this year, regardless of region, included talk of diversification, timing buffers, and delivery assurance.

4. Portfolios with proof are becoming the market standard

This theme cut across every event, every dinner, every hallway chat:

Procurement standards are rising fast, and buyers now expect diversification, durability, and risk management backed by real transparency, real traceability, verified methodologies, and delivery data they can interrogate, not just summarized claims or spreadsheets.

A portfolio doesn’t work unless buyers can see and trust what’s in it.

Which leads to the clearest buyer trend of 2025:

The market isn’t just scaling carbon removal.
It’s scaling confidence in carbon removal.

And confidence is what brings capital, procurement, and multi-year commitments.

My takeaway from a year back in CDR

Coming back to carbon removal in 2025 has been energizing, humbling, chaotic, clarifying, and deeply hopeful.

This year showed me:

• Carbon removal is global now, truly.
• Buyers are maturing unevenly, but unmistakably.
• Traceability and trust are becoming the backbone of procurement.
• Project execution is the real bottleneck.
• Policy is turbulent, but momentum is bigger than policy.
• And community is the glue holding it all together.

If 2024 was about experimentation and 2025 about tightening standards, then 2026 needs to be about market maturity and execution. The market must prove it can deliver what it sells by executing on volume, timelines, and verification while making procurement standardized, defensible, and repeatable. At the same time, it must strengthen clear quality signals, trusted intermediated pathways, and credible policy support so that rising buyer scrutiny converts into long-term, scalable demand rather than hesitation.

This is no longer the experimental market I left.
It’s becoming a real market, messy, imperfect, ambitious, and accelerating.

And maybe best of all:

Carbon removal is no longer confined to boardrooms and conference stages.
It’s happening at brunch tables, rooftop happy hours, hotel lobbies, and across continents.

It’s becoming lived, global work.