CarbonPlan

Overview

The Giving Green Fund plans to award a restricted grant to CarbonPlan, a US-based nonprofit that analyzes the design and efficacy of climate projects and programs, primarily those related to carbon offsets, carbon removal, and climate risks. This is one of a series of ecosystem grants supporting foundational work to unlock innovative policy approaches for durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) demand.

CarbonPlan falls within our philanthropic strategy of carbon dioxide removal. Please see Giving Green’s deep dive report on CDR for more information, including risks and potential co-benefits, recommended sub-strategies, theory of change, funding need, and key uncertainties.

Last updated: October 2024

What is CarbonPlan?

Founded in 2020, CarbonPlan is a US-based nonprofit that analyzes the design and efficacy of public and private projects and programs in the context of carbon offsets, CDR, and climate risks. CarbonPlan conducts research, develops policy, and builds software to help improve climate programs across the private and public sectors.

What are we funding at CarbonPlan and how could it help scale demand for CDR?

This grant funds CarbonPlan’s exploration of questions and contexts outside of conventional demand policies (i.e. credit-based carbon markets), which we think will motivate new and creative research design and applications. We think this could expand understanding of how, where, and to what extent CDR can be embedded across industries and applications, unlocking new opportunities to scale CDR demand to meet climate targets. 

Specifically, CarbonPlan will conduct research on agricultural lime, a soil additive, and its comparative CDR potential. Conventional thinking suggests that carbon credits could be used as financial subsidies for farmers to amend their practices to include additives that sequester carbon. However, the use of agricultural lime is currently incentivized through pay-for-practice policies (policies that subsidize implementation rather than performance) in the US; according to CarbonPlan, it is difficult to integrate agricultural lime into existing carbon markets because of the challenge of determining additionality. CarbonPlan is modeling CDR outcomes of agricultural lime and silicates, which are more well-established and understood in the context of carbon markets, to compare conditions under which one might outperform the other in terms of net climate benefits. In contexts where their findings show that agricultural lime has greater climate benefit, their evidence could be used to support the expansion of pay-for-practice policies for agricultural lime, thus (a) increasing demand for and deployment of this CDR practice and (b) providing a proof point for policies that do not rely on credit-based financing. CarbonPlan plans to publish results in an academic paper as well as a public-facing explainer.

Why do we think CarbonPlan will use this funding well? 

CarbonPlan’s team has deep technical expertise and a track record of producing high-quality and influential tools, research, and commentary, as evidenced by its collaborations with Frontier and strong partnerships with CDR companies, scientists, and other ecosystem actors. Because of this, we think that it is well-positioned to conduct strategic and rigorous research to support meaningful shifts in policy and market approaches.

Giving Green believes that additional climate donations are likely to be most impactful when directed to our top nonprofits. For a number of reasons, we may choose to recommend grants to other organizations for work that we believe is at least as impactful as grants to our top recommendations. We are highlighting this grant to offer transparency to donors to the Giving Green Fund as well as to provide a resource for donors who are particularly interested in this impact strategy. This is a nonpartisan analysis (study or research) and is provided for educational purposes.