How to Become a Net Zero Company
Speak to our Farming Manager
Our Technology
Climate Glossary
" />
London Climate Action Week (LCAW) 2026 drew more than 100,000 attendees, and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) featured more prominently on the agenda than in previous years. Across the panels, roundtables, and side events UNDO’s team attended, one shift stood out. The conversation has moved on from whether CDR will scale. It is now about how.
Three themes kept resurfacing across conversations that week:
– The need for a firmer demand signal from compliance markets
– Financing tools that have not yet caught up with a more fragmented buyer landscape
– Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) processes that remain more manual than the sector needs them to be
While these themes are not novel, what was notable was how consistently they surfaced across various panels, pointing to a market converging on the same priorities from multiple directions.
Why Doesn’t the Market Have a Firm Demand Signal Yet?
Voluntary and compliance-linked carbon markets are growing, but they carry a persistent tension: credits are often priced based on where the market is today, not on the quality and permanence the sector is working toward. That tension is clearest in aviation.
CORSIA, the industry’s compliance scheme, allows airlines to purchase carbon credits at prices that reflect current supply rather than the durability of the removal itself. At an LCAW panel hosted by RBC Capital Markets, featuring IAG (British Airways’ parent company) alongside Louis Dreyfus Company and ClearBlue Markets, panellists modelled what closing that gap could cost. Shifting the scheme toward higher-quality, higher-permanence credits could add in the region of 20% to airline ticket prices in the near term. That figure is a useful signal of the scale of transition ahead, and a reminder that building a higher-integrity compliance market takes deliberate planning rather than a single policy switch.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) mandates offer one route through that transition. Rather than treating SAF and carbon credits as competing solutions, several voices at LCAW pointed to the two working in tandem, an angle that remains underexplored relative to the attention each receives on its own.
The more fundamental question raised that week was less about mechanism design and more about timing. A separate roundtable on accelerating carbon markets identified compliance markets as the key lever for unlocking demand at scale, while also acknowledging the ongoing challenge smaller projects face in attracting buyers without one. UNDO’s CEO, Jim Mann, put the underlying logic simply on his own panel:
“At some point, if you’re going to burn fossil fuels, you’re going to have to remove fossil fuels from the atmosphere and put them back in the geological record.”
His point was that the market does not need a fully functioning compliance regime today. It needs a firm date. A confirmed timeline would give buyers, financiers, and project developers a demand signal to build against, well ahead of the mechanism itself becoming fully operational. That view aligns with the broader policy conversation underway across Europe, with frameworks such as the EU’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement expected to shape investment and procurement decisions over the next 12 months.
Can Financing Models Keep Pace With a Fragmenting Buyer Landscape?
As the pool of very large offtake agreements narrows, developers across the CDR sector are assembling a greater number of smaller deals instead, each with its own transaction cost. That shift is reshaping what financing needs to look like, and it plays out differently across asset classes.
A panel featuring Carbon Direct and Stora Enso illustrated the contrast well. For a company of its scale, financing is rarely the primary constraint; the challenge is often demand, as securing buyer appetite at scale can be more demanding than accessing capital itself. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) sits closer to the opposite end of that spectrum. As a younger, more capital-intensive asset class, financing bankable projects ahead of secured long-term offtake remains an obstacle, one that grows as offtakes get smaller and more numerous.
Several LCAW conversations pointed to the same response: financing instruments designed to spread risk rather than eliminate it, on a project-by-project basis.
At a roundtable of suppliers, buyers, and insurers, hosted by HSBC Innovation Banking and Howden’s Insurance, HSBC introduced an offtake financing product that is still in development and asked for feedback from the room. The structure allows developers to borrow against a signed offtake agreement – whilst this is similar to UNDO’s FOAK financing deal with Inlandsis, UNDO’s CFO, Alexandra Bury, who attended the session, saw real significance in a major global bank building products specific to carbon removal, alongside a clear limit:
“Interestingly, big banks are now starting to shift and offer financing products that are more niche. But it’s not scalable yet: you can’t sign a new set of financing for every single offtake.”
The product works well for larger offtakes of the kind UNDO has already signed. The harder problem runs the other way: as the market diversifies toward a broader base of smaller buyers, a per-deal financing structure does not lend itself to that shift.
A separate event, hosted by Terra Natural Capital and Kita Insurance, focused on nature-based solutions and explored options to pool delivery risk amongst suppliers. A structure where multiple project developers contribute to a shared fund and can draw from it if they fall short of their own delivery, spreading risk across the group rather than insuring each contract in isolation. Such structures have precedent in other industries facing hard-to-insure risks, and it was encouraging to see existing financial structures being applied to an evolving space like CDR rather than seeking to reinvent the wheel. The Carbon Direct roundtable raised a related “asset pool” approach, in which a portfolio of projects can backfill delayed or underperforming projects, alongside a growing role for insurance as replacement credits become scarce on the spot market.
That mix, a real appetite for innovation alongside honesty about what isn’t ready yet, ran through several of the week’s financing and risk conversations. Across them, the common thread was that the strongest deals tend to be collaborative and transparent, with trust between counterparties mattering as much as the contractual terms themselves.
Where Is the Opportunity in MRV?
If compliance markets are the demand-side piece of the puzzle, MRV is where the operational gains are waiting to be made. Across project types and geographies, measurement, reporting, and verification remain largely manual, and that is increasingly seen as one of the clearest areas where the sector could move faster with the right tools.
The Carbon Direct roundtable raised AI as a potential accelerant for verification. Stora Enso, from direct experience, described how much groundwork MRV compliance currently requires, a pattern consistent with what buyers and developers report across the CDR market more broadly. This opportunity is not limited to any one project type or removal pathway, which is part of why it kept surfacing across conversations that week.
UNDO’s own work on ERW measurement, including its SAT-C methodology, points to where some of that opportunity lies, such as in how efficiently data is captured in the first place. A method that captures agronomic and geochemical data as part of routine field operations, rather than as separate exercises layered on top of one another, addresses some of the cost and speed challenges at their source. It is one contribution to a challenge the wider sector is still working through, and one that UNDO expects to keep investing in as its own approach to measurement develops.
What Do Buyers Actually Need to Move?
The conversations above focus on supply. On the buyer side, the picture at LCAW was shifting too. CUR8 is a familiar partner to UNDO, having helped structure the first-of-a-kind financing deal that unlocked upfront capital from Standard Chartered against UNDO’s offtake with British Airways. Marta Krupinska, CUR8’s CEO and co-founder, published a widely shared reflection on the week that captured much of this shift on the buyer side. Corporate buyers are increasingly framing carbon removal around co-benefits, and linking these directly to business strategy rather than treating them as a separate sustainability narrative:
– Clean water
– Energy access
– Jobs
A “now, next, later” portfolio approach is also gaining traction, sequencing near-term reductions in short-lived pollutants, nature-based removals in the medium term, and durable CDR as the long-term component.
Perhaps most significant is who is making these decisions. Carbon removal purchases are increasingly being led by CFOs rather than CSOs, reframed as a financial hedge: paying a set price now against the risk of paying substantially more in several years’ time. That framing does for buyer psychology what a firm compliance market date does for policy: both create a demand signal that lets financing and project development move ahead of full regulatory certainty, rather than waiting for it.
Where This Leaves the Sector
Policy looks set to be one of the biggest drivers of the carbon removal market over the next year, as frameworks like the EU’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework, Article 6 mechanisms, and public procurement programmes take clearer shape. Financing instruments are already adapting to a more fragmented buyer landscape, and that innovation shows every sign of continuing. MRV, long treated as simply a compliance cost, is increasingly recognised as a place where genuine efficiency gains are within reach.
For UNDO, the throughline is a familiar one: durable carbon removal works best at scale when it can be measured efficiently, financed sensibly, and demanded consistently. LCAW 2026 suggested the sector is starting to treat all three as connected opportunities rather than solving them in isolation, and that shift is a genuinely encouraging sign of where the market is heading.
Get in touch
UNDO's team is happy to discuss carbon removal markets, MRV, or how enhanced rock weathering fits into the wider picture. Contact us to continue the conversation.
