Here’s how philanthropy is partnering with communities to advance carbon dioxide removal by deploying innovative solutions.

For millions of years, the Earth has naturally removed and stored carbon dioxide (CO₂) through plants and rocks in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium. Kelp, for example, is a giant offshore forest that consumes CO₂ as it grows. When it dies, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, safely storing many thousands of tons of CO₂. When certain types of rocks are exposed to air, they remove and store CO₂. When rainwater washes alkaline rocks into the sea, the minerals help to alkalize seawater and help the ocean remove and store CO₂.

However, since industrialization in the late 1800s, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have increased by 50%, while deforestation and ocean acidification have hampered the Earth’s carbon removal systems — causing rapid temperature increases, floods, droughts, and other disasters that are now spinning out of control. Last year, land sources stored almost no carbon dioxide at all. The oceans are absorbing far more carbon dioxide than they should, which makes them very acidic, harming fish, sea plants, coral reefs, and all the millions of people worldwide who depend on the seas for their livelihoods.

Stopping this destructive cycle requires achieving two goals by 2050: reaching net-zero carbon emissions and removing 10 gigatons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year. Those 10 gigatons need to be locked away for at least 1000 years in order for the planet’s climate to stabilize because CO₂ in the atmosphere takes a very long time to break down. Fortunately, the planet knows how to remove carbon dioxide. The field of carbon dioxide removal basically aims to restore or to accelerate these processes to give the planet a helping hand. Saleem Chapman, Jan Mazurek, and Victoria Gonzalez from ClimateWorks Foundation sat down together to discuss the unique role philanthropy can play in accelerating carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies — and why justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) are critical to achieving these ambitious and necessary climate goals.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Saleem Chapman: So, ten gigatons sounds like a lot of carbon! Can you help us understand what CDR looks like in practice? What are the most promising strategies? 

Victoria Gonzalez: You’re right — ten gigatons is about twice the weight of all people presently alive on the planet. The good news is that there are many natural systems that we can learn from and enhance to safely and equitably remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and prevent the worst of climate change impacts.  

One example is a process developed by a company called Heirloom. With support from a 2018 ClimateWorks research grant, Heirloom’s co-founder, Noah McQueen, developed a way to heat limestone, which naturally removes CO₂ from the atmosphere, in order to accelerate what otherwise is a purely natural process. Heirloom then permanently stores the CO₂ in concrete. What’s left over is a compound called lime, which naturally wants to restabilize into limestone — so it acts like a sponge that sucks up CO₂ from the atmosphere around it. Heirloom is basically replicating one of Earth’s natural processes, using heat to accelerate the rate at which limestone naturally removes CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Jan Mazurek: We always look for opportunities to support human-nature collaboration. For example, when we mine for rocks and minerals, we create “tailings” — basically, big piles of leftover rocks and minerals, which contaminate water and deplete the soil. Innovators such as Carbon Vault, Carbon Cure, Arca, and Exterra are finding that if they just turn over certain types of reactive rocks, some mine tailings remove CO₂. This has the dual positive effect of removing carbon while cleaning up waste from the mining industry. California has a number of abandoned asbestos mines, which pose serious human health and environmental risks, as asbestos is a leading cause of lung cancer. Applied to asbestos, removed CO₂ can render the toxic substance inert in a matter of hours.

Chapman: What role do justice and equity play in carbon removal, and why are our JEDI guiding principles so important to achieving these big CDR goals?

Gonzalez: Without justice and equity embedded in our carbon removal work, we would miss out on the importance of rooting climate action in a local context. Too often, climate solutions are implemented without an understanding of existing power dynamics and inequities, so the “solutions” repeat or reinforce environmental harms to specific communities. It matters where projects are sited and how communities are engaged in the planning and implementation process. Grantee partners like Project 2030 engage local communities early on and often in the process of potential deployment of new carbon removal projects — especially those communities that have borne the brunt of industrialization and environmental harm.

Mazurek: The cities of Inglewood and Compton, California are prime examples where emissions from the nearby airport and seaport cause tens of thousands of premature deaths, childhood asthma, and heart problems. One of our advisors, Etosha Cave, is a scientist and entrepreneur who grew up in Texas, near the oil industry. Etosha’s company, Twelve, removes CO₂ from the air and repurposes it into clean, sustainable aviation fuel. The beauty of this work is two-fold: it has the potential to remove pollutants such as PM 2.5 — particles from jets that lodge deep in human lungs — from airport-adjacent communities in the short term and immediately displace oil from airplanes. The Federal Aviation Administration allows sustainable aviation fuels to be blended in today’s jets at a rate of up to 50%. 

Southern California also has oil refineries that are shutting down, so there is major potential to help people who have worked in the oil industry translate their skills into this growing CDR industry. Along with our partners in the ClimateWorks Aviation program, we want to accelerate solutions like this that provide an immediate pathway to health and prosperity. 

Chapman: What challenges or obstacles have you encountered in bringing a JEDI approach to your work?

Mazurek: The terminology of scientists and academics can be confusing. The processes we’ve been describing here are also called direct air capture (DAC), which happens to sound a lot like another process, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). In reality, they’re totally different. DAC removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using a process first harnessed to help people breathe while scuba diving as well as when traveling to space; CCS simply captures carbon dioxide at the end of a pipe during the process of burning fossil fuels. The oil industry often uses CCS to justify continuing to pump oil out of the ground. Most oil refineries around the world are adjacent to communities that are already overburdened, and CCS gives oil companies social license to continue polluting them. We’re trying to shut down oil while creating new green jobs to help communities transition away from the fossil fuel industry.

There is legitimate skepticism of technological solutions such as CCS, especially from an outside entity that comes into a community and claims to have the answers to long-standing problems. I encountered this early in my career while working on Superfund site remediation in southern Virginia. Local communities were skeptical of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coming in to clean up hazardous waste dumped there by private companies. How could they be sure the EPA would clean up the sites in a way that wouldn’t cause even more disruption and sickness?

Ultimately, there is no single strategy that can solve climate change on its own, and it’s dangerous to assume so. Our JEDI work helps us to center people and communities by reminding us to ask tough questions about who is involved in the process and who is excluded. As Victoria noted earlier, we aim to fund work that not only deploys good strategies but also provides guardrails, supports public outreach, and requires documentation of public benefits. 

Gonzalez: There is also a wide range of different carbon removal approaches, each with a specific set of opportunities and challenges, but many people often look at carbon removal as only including technological solutions. These challenges are why it’s so critical that our grantees and partners in the CDR ecosystem engage with communities and the public to educate about CDR but also create paths for two-way dialogue and intentional listening. Our grantees at Data for Progress are a great example of an organization spending the time required to build trusting relationships. It is really important to determine whether solutions can be implemented responsibly with the community’s best interests in mind.

Chapman: How does carbon removal work across different regions, and how does the JEDI framework inform your program strategy?

Gonzalez: Like any climate action strategy, carbon removal isn’t a blanket solution. You have to consider the geography of each place, along with the social, political, and economic characteristics, to identify which carbon removal and storage approaches will work best. 

Kenya is a great example. The Rift Valley has major potential for both geothermal energy and carbon removal and storage. There’s interest from the Kenyan government and others in leveraging this geographic opportunity to scale carbon removal. In Kenya, however, some rural households still lack energy access. So we are funding Oxford University researchers to ensure that using the Rift Valley’s ample zero-carbon geothermal power for removals does not deprive last-mile households of much-needed electricity. 

We are also funding researchers from the Technical University of Kenya to estimate Kenya’s ability to permanently store removed carbon dioxide in the country’s highly reactive basalt rocks. We hope that by funding both efforts to better ensure removal benefits people as well as geophysical science initiatives, we can come to understand whether the social opportunities will match the geographic potential to scale removals in the region. 

Chapman: What are the major successes or key learnings thus far in your program’s JEDI journey?

Mazurek: One of our earliest grants was to Native Americans in Philanthropy to explore the potential for natural carbon removal on tribal lands. That initial work laid the foundation for a multimillion-dollar grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to Native Americans in Philanthropy. Our efforts were recognized by former Vice President Harris at her 2024 Earth Day Celebration, which our CEO Helen Mountford was invited to attend in acknowledgment of ClimateWorks’ contributions to tribal engagement in climate action.

Gonzalez:  Our program has continuously made an effort to build partnerships and relationships with historically underrepresented groups in philanthropy, particularly with Tribal and youth-led groups. 

Many Indigenous communities have longstanding practices of tending to the natural world in ways that support the Earth’s ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere and can contribute a wealth of carbon removal knowledge and leadership. Grantees such as the Global Ocean Health’s Partnership for Tribal Carbon Solutions have been hosting discussions among various Tribes to find alignment on collective efforts to scale greenhouse gas removals.  

We’ve also engaged youth-led and youth-centered organizations to empower young people and cultivate hope among the next generation that, through strategies like carbon removal, we have a chance at a livable future on this planet. We structured our grants to Youth On Root and Youth4Nature using principles of trust-based grantmaking, and their work bringing youth voices to the table has shown us the power of providing unrestricted funding with minimal reporting requirements.  

Chapman: What would an equitable and just carbon removal landscape look like to you? 

Mazurek: I want to bring it back to the local level again. The next Summer Olympics will be in Los Angeles in 2028. By that time, I would love to see people in communities like Inglewood and Compton  living free from the burden of asthma attacks, heart conditions, and premature deaths that come from aircraft pollution. Aircraft today can fly on removed carbon in blends of up to 50%. Such “sustainable aviation fuel” as noted earlier not only displaces oil but also dramatically reduces fine pollution particles that lodge deep in human lungs. This is not a pie-in-the-sky approach. This is very practical. 

The grants we’ve described here have helped unleash about $10 billion in federal recovery dollars that can be assembled in places such as California with rigorous environmental standards and community participation requirements. If we take that model and adapt it through collaborating with communities across the world, I think we’ll see a more just and equitable carbon removal landscape. 

Gonzalez: I hope carbon removal will be understood as a waste treatment process that is feasible both locally and globally. Since carbon removals are lowering the overall concentration of atmospheric CO₂, they have the unique ability to combat legacy emissions in the air. Carbon removal should be as normal as your weekly garbage pickup, a safe and equitable process that improves outcomes for all people and the planet.

Chapman: Lastly, if you could share one key message about carbon removal with climate funders, what would it be?

Mazurek: We have just 25 years to figure out how to remove ten gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. Right now, carbon removal receives just $830 million per year in foundation funding. Philanthropy must step up to increase our collective ambition around carbon removal if we want to keep temperatures from increasing by well above 1.5° C. If we don’t hit our 2050 goals, we will hand our children and grandchildren a very bleak future. 

Gonzalez: I see firsthand how climate change is threatening my family in Florida with catastrophic hurricanes, and when I go diving, I see coral reefs increasingly bleached from ocean acidification. It’s overwhelming, but CDR offers a glint of hope that we can actually prevent the worst from happening. What I would tell climate funders is to look at the trends, look at the numbers, and realize that we need to be pragmatic and act quickly. Philanthropy has a huge opportunity to expand our toolbox.