2025 Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal

This report by Carbon Direct and Microsoft can help you understand what high-quality carbon dioxide removal (CDR) project criteria look like. The report presents a set of essential principles that are intended to help characterise high-quality CDR projects and provides specific criteria for multiple types of CDR projects, including afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation; soil carbon; mangrove forestation; improved forest management; enhanced rock weathering in croplands; biomass carbon removal and storage; abiotic marine carbon dioxide removal; carbon mineralisation; and direct air capture. For each type of CDR project, the report addresses social harms, benefits, and environmental justice; environmental harms and benefits; additionality and baselines; measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification; durability; and leakage. This resource will be most useful to sustainability and procurement practitioners engaged in procuring CDR.