From commitment to delivery: the CDR conversations that mattered at LCAW 2026 

London Climate Action Week 2026 ran from 22-27 June with sweltering record temperatures in London, under the theme “Cooperation in a fragmented world” – a nod to a geopolitical backdrop that has challenged the multilateral progress supporting climate action.  

However, across every session that Puro.earth convened or participated in, the prevailing mood wasn’t one of fragility. It was one of momentum. What was clear to us is that the CDR market is broadening, deepening, and attracting serious attention from serious institutions.  

Puro.earth on the ground: what we convened, and where we went 

The Puro.earth team on the ground attended over 30 events in total – spanning topics including CDR and AI, buyer / supplier coordination on issuance, the future of carbon market development, sustainable data centres, geologically stored carbon and biochar. What were some of the highlights?  

At the start of the week, Puro.earth was a proud partner of Carbon Removal London, convened by Supercritical. Jan-Willem Bode, Puro.earth President, spoke on what biochar looks like in 2035 – a forward-looking framing that unpacked some of the complex questions that need to be addressed in order to help biochar scale. This included discussion on price, distributed vs industrial production, dMRV and project financing.   

We co-convened a closed-door buyer-supplier roundtable with Carbon Direct and Nasdaq, where a focused group of buyers and suppliers gathered for a working conversation on what it actually takes to support new deals and recurring issuance. 

We hosted a CDR Community Drinks with Carbon Direct and Nasdaq on a terrace in the City of London, with well over 80 of our suppliers, buyers and trusted partners in attendance, with the aim to bring together some of the most active participants in the CDR market for an informal gathering on a rooftop terrace.  

Later in the week we ran a working roundtable on biomass traceability in Geologically Stored Carbon, with Gevo as a case study. The session reviewed Puro.earth’s updated GSC methodology, walking through how Gevo’s BECCS pathway maps to updated traceability requirements – from feedstock origin through geological storage – and how the updated approach affects buyer-facing diligence.  

What we were talking about 

Across our own events and the broader programme, a handful of themes kept surfacing: 

1. Voluntary and compliance markets are complementary, not convergent: The voluntary market will remain larger than compliance at least until 2035. Different buyers will operate under different frameworks, with different obligations, which is precisely why we announced our multi-program approach ahead of London Climate Action Week. What matters is that both markets develop rigour, and that the infrastructure linking them is built properly and robustly. 

2. Buyer needs are diverse – and that diversity is healthy: Some buyers want a liquid spot market to improve access and price discovery. Others are building portfolios across multiple methodologies, wanting to support a range of CDR technologies and pathways as they scale. There is no single buyer profile – and this is changing as more and more companies from a wide range of sectors are procuring CDR for the first time. Understanding that diversity and building infrastructure that serves all of it is the challenge – and the opportunity. 

3. Suppliers are innovating: The supplier base is maturing quickly, and the conversations this week reflected that complexity. Many were talking about the evolution of different pathways, difference approaches to financing and commercial structures, and diverse go-to-market strategies. The infrastructure supporting it needs to keep pace.  

4. Collaboration is the operating principle: Whether buyers, suppliers, intermediaries, or governments – the conversations that moved things forward were the ones where people were genuinely willing to grow the pie together.  

5. The opportunity presented by SBTi CNZS V2.0: the updated Corporate Net Zero Standard has already generated an immediate increase in buy-side interest, particularly around biochar across various corporate sectors including food and beverage and fashion businesses, to name but a few. The recognition of EACs and book-and-claim instruments as tools for Scope 3 action is a meaningful step – and a “pretty bullish signal for the market,” as our President Jan-Willem Bode put it in several conversations he had during the week. 

What’s next 

Inevitably the attention now turns to New York Climate Week. On 21 September, Puro.earth will host our Puro.earth CDR Summit where we hope to continue some of the meaningful conversations we had on the ground last week in London. More details to follow soon, with programming underway…. 

Beyond that, the horizon is COP31 in Antalya where work is ongoing to build on the momentum around CDR from last year in in Belém.  

LCAW 2026 wasn’t a moment to reflect on how far CDR has come. It was the start of the next chapter – and we’re glad to be working on this alongside the CDR community. 

Huge thanks to every supplier, buyer, partner, and collaborator who came to our events, invited us to theirs, and brought the quality of thinking that moves CDR forward. The CDR community is larger and more engaged than it has ever been, and one hot week in London was proof of this in action. 

———————— 

Here is a small selection of photos of our events and others we attended from across the week: