Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) stands at a critical crossroads. The urgency needed to address climate change requires us to scale mature technologies rapidly while simultaneously fostering innovation in emerging pathways. The challenge? Balancing the need for rigorous monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) standards with the flexibility to nurture nascent technologies. The Absolute Carbon Standard (ACS) introduces Mitigation Classes as a novel approach to address this dual need, ensuring that innovation thrives without compromising the integrity of carbon removal claims.
Today’s MRV isn’t fit for purpose
The dual needs of the carbon removal industry - to innovate and scale - present a dilemma. Early-stage projects often need to focus on demonstrating feasibility rather than delivering incontrovertible climate benefits. This makes rigid MRV requirements overly burdensome, delaying progress and discouraging innovation. At the same time, scaling commercial projects demands strict MRV protocols to ensure buyers receive credits that deliver on promised climate impacts.
This creates a challenging conflict for existing standards. Do you hold all projects to the same high bar of MRV requirements, limiting the number of projects you can credit? Or do you take a more permissive approach, lowering the bar for earlier stage pathways and projects, so you can credit for a wider range of activities? Unfortunately today’s standards struggle with this conflict, and often take a more permissive approach, eroding trust and creating confusion for carbon removal buyers.
For buyers, permissive standards that mix early innovation projects with mature approaches make it difficult to evaluate the quality and credibility of credits. They’re often left trying to navigate a confusing landscape where different types of projects are lumped together without transparent distinctions. This makes buying credits much more challenging, because buyers have to do deep diligence to understand whether a credit aligns with their climate goals. Getting it wrong is risks reputational damage, exposes buyers to litigation and compliance risks. These challenges make it harder for existing buyers to scale their procurement, and discourages new buyers from entering the market.
Mitigation Classes create clear distinctions of project readiness
To solve these challenges, Absolute Climate is introducing a structured and transparent framework - Mitigation Classes. Mitigation Classes create separate credit labels for mature projects and innovations, removing the need for a compromise solution and ensuring that credit claims always match climate impacts.
Mitigation Classes categorize carbon removal projects based on their ability to meet rigorous MRV requirements described by the Absolute Carbon Standard (ACS). They provide a pathway for projects at different stages of development to participate responsibly in the carbon removal market. The framework offers two distinct classifications, each tailored to address the unique needs of projects, Absolute Class and Innovation Class:
Absolute Class represents projects that meet all of the requirements of the Absolute Carbon Standard (ACS). By default, ACS is designed to ensure the rigor required for mature projects that are scaling up. These projects have achieved comprehensive validation, ensuring that their credits reflect measurable and verified climate benefits. Absolute Class credits provide buyers with confidence in the reliability of climate impacts tied to their credit purchase. This classification signifies that a project’s climate benefits have been thoroughly demonstrated, making these credits suitable for buyers seeking established solutions.
Innovation Class is designed for early-stage projects that aren't able to meet some of the requirements of ACS, because they're still developing their technology or utilize a pathway with unresolved scientific uncertainty. These projects are given the flexibility to focus on feasibility and foundational data collection rather than meeting every stringent requirement of the Absolute Carbon Standard. This approach encourages innovation while maintaining transparency through gap assessments, which detail areas of uncertainty and highlight areas of progress. Innovation Class credits enable buyers to support groundbreaking technologies while understanding the associated risks as part of fostering long-term growth.
Explicit Mitigation Classes acknowledges the distinct needs of projects at different stages of maturity, fostering an inclusive yet rigorous approach to scaling carbon removal solutions.
Mitigation Classes reduce risks for buyers and enable project developers to move faster
Mitigation Classes offer significant advantages for both buyers and project developers, helping to align the incentives and expectations of these key stakeholders.
For buyers, Mitigation Classes introduce a new level of clarity and confidence. Those purchasing Innovation Class credits gain valuable insights into the project’s progress and limitations through detailed gap assessments. This transparency enables buyers to support innovation while understanding the associated risks. Meanwhile, Absolute Class credits provide a turnkey solution to ensuring alignment with stringent climate goals.
Project developers also benefit from this framework. With Innovation Class, they gain more flexibility to focus on proving feasibility without being constrained by mature MRV requirements. At the same time, they can build trust and credibility by demonstrating iterative progress towards meeting the full set of ACS requirements. The Absolute Class designation provides a clear signal of maturity, and demonstrates that a project's credit claims match their climate impacts.
Mitigation Classes are critical to the long-term success of carbon removal markets
Without a clear distinction between early-stage innovations and mature projects, the carbon removal industry risks falling into a race to the bottom.
In an effort to attract participation, standards are continually lowered, allowing projects that are still unable to fully demonstrate their climate impacts to credit alongside mature projects. While this approach might initially expand the market, it ultimately erodes trust among buyers, as the quality and credibility of carbon credits become inconsistent and unreliable. Over time, this undermines the entire market's progress, creating confusion for buyers and discouraging investment in both innovative and proven solutions.
Mitigation Classes address this issue by introducing a structured and transparent system that distinguishes between projects at different stages of maturity. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all standard or compromising on rigor, Mitigation Classes provide tailored pathways for both early-stage innovations and mature, scaling projects. Innovation Class credits allow emerging technologies to focus on feasibility and foundational development while maintaining transparency through detailed gap assessments. Absolute Class credits ensure that established projects meet the stringent climate goals.
Enabling a high integrity future for carbon removal
Mitigation Classes prevent the need to lower standards across the board to accommodate a wide range of projects. Instead, buyers gain clarity on what they’re purchasing - whether they are supporting groundbreaking innovation with known risks or helping to scale climate benefits from mature solutions. By maintaining clear, rigorous benchmarks for both classes, Mitigation Classes prevent the dilution of market integrity, enabling the industry to grow responsibly while avoiding the pitfalls of permissive standards.
You can read more about the specific requirements of Mitigation Classes in the upcoming release of the Absolute Carbon Standard.
Do you have questions or input? Are you curious about collaborating with Absolute Climate? We’d love to talk - hello@absoluteclimate.com
