By Carbon to Sea Initiative
Last week, as part of Climate Week NYC 2025, Carbon to Sea co-hosted a panel event on “Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR): Fact, Fiction, and the Future,” in partnership with [C]Worthy and Hourglass Climate. The event brought together leaders in the field — researchers, private sector companies, nonprofits, investors, environmental advocates, and other stakeholders — to discuss common misconceptions about mCDR, also known as ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (oCDR).
The panel was moderated by Alicia Karspeck, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of [C]Worthy, who opened the session by acknowledging the rapid pace of research and early projects over the last several years. As a result, out-of-date narratives persist about the state of oCDR science and the field. The panel aimed to address several of these key misconceptions through insights from several of the leading independent nonprofit organizations engaged in oCDR research and stakeholder engagement.
Responsible research pilots are securing permits under existing regulatory frameworks.
Diane Hoskins, Global Policy Director at Carbon to Sea, noted that while the regulatory landscape is still developing, “we’re not starting from scratch.” She referenced that, in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent approval of the country’s first offshore permit for an ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) trial in the Gulf of Maine set an encouraging precedent for responsible research. The approval comes at a moment of growing bipartisan interest and investment in oCDR.
“EPA permit issuance and inclusion of relevant environmental safeguards should build confidence that current law can enable responsible research and advance any needed protections for the environment,” said Hoskins. “Looking ahead, we’ll need to continually check-in: are projects grounded in rigorous science able to advance? Are policy frameworks adequate to prevent ill advised proposals? The coming years will be an exciting time to help ensure our policies keep pace with research and ensure we meet the full sum of our ocean health and climate change goals.”
Deep community engagement efforts are resulting in improved research plans and local support.
Dr. Grace Andrews, Founder and Executive Director of Hourglass Climate drew from her experiences working directly with communities around ocean-based climate solutions, emphasizing that public perspectives on this type of research are more varied than often assumed. Hourglass Climate is engaged as a monitoring partner in first-of-its-kind enhanced weathering field trials off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Andrews pointed to these case studies as examples where proactive outreach efforts helped communities become excited by the potential of the research.
“Communities are not monolithic,” said Andrews. “When researchers engage community leaders and local stakeholders, we’ve seen first-hand how this creates safer, efficient, and ultimately more successful oCDR research that also addresses community questions and needs.”
Prototypes are emerging for Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification of carbon accounting for oCDR research.
Dr. Matt Long, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of [C]Worthy discussed ongoing efforts to develop MRV tools and frameworks, noting that the field is rapidly evolving to build reliable systems for tracking and verifying carbon removal. In just the past year, protocols that bring together the complementary power of observations and state-of-the-science modeling systems have been put into practice in the real-world. Simultaneously, research and development work by the scientific community are growing and refining the underlying scientific knowledge base. [C]Worthy, for instance, developed an interactive OAE Efficiency Map in collaboration with CarbonPlan to describe where OAE can be done most efficiently around the world.
“MRV is a key component in supporting scientifically sound research throughout the field,” said Long. “Tools like the OAE Efficiency Map help inform our broad understanding of how mCDR operates in the global ocean. At the same time, refined, project-specific MRV is being put into practice.”
New standards and tools are enabling robust and interoperable monitoring of ecosystem response to oCDR.
While it’s widely understood that the ocean is incredibly complex and underobserved, panelists highlighted the efforts underway to adapt existing environmental risk assessment and monitoring approaches used to assess things like shellfish health and wastewater safety, for the unique nuances of oCDR. Andrews highlighted Hourglass’ development of the Framework for Ecotoxicological Modeling of mCDR (FEMM) and its forthcoming publication next month, as a community tool that directly translates risk assessment approaches with widespread regulatory precedent for oCDR.
“It’s true that measuring isolated impacts of oCDR on the ocean ecosystem is difficult. But it’s also true that monitoring ecosystem response is possible and necessary,” said Hoskins. “This work is complex, but the more of us that are focused on it, the more efficient our sector can be in answering these key questions around environmental impact. Increasing global ocean observations will help increase our understanding of ocean processes for the benefit of many existing constituencies and has the potential to increase confidence in models.”
Thanks to all the partners and participants who joined for this engaging discussion during Climate Week NYC. Despite a few persistent myths, significant progress has already been made to advancing oCDR research permitting, MRV and environmental monitoring practices, and community engagement. Carbon to Sea is focused on funding research and responsible field building efforts to build on those efforts and address many of the opportunities highlighted during the panel.
To learn more about our work and stay up to date with future events and updates, visit our website at carbontosea.org.
