In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme sit down for a second time with Alexia Kelly, Managing Director of the Carbon Policy and Markets Initiative at the High Tide Foundation, to unpack today’s messy carbon market governance landscape and what it really means for carbon removal.
Over the past few years, carbon markets have been flooded with new initiatives, standards, and coalitions, most of them aimed at the supply side. The result: overlapping frameworks, lots of noise, and real confusion for buyers and CDR actors trying to understand what actually matters, while demand stubbornly lags behind.
This episode explores which pieces of the governance architecture are genuinely useful (think ICVCM, VCMI, SBTi and more), where they are falling short, and how this affects the future of carbon removals. We also ask what it would take to move from proliferation to coherence, and why the next few years could be make‑or‑break for building carbon markets that are both high‑integrity and fit to finance CDR at scale.