Carbon Gap: Grantee Spotlight (Q3 2026)

The Giving Green Fund is awarding an unrestricted grant to Carbon Gap to advance European policies that create large-scale demand for carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Carbon Gap is a nonprofit that works exclusively on CDR policy in Europe, engaging policymakers in the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Carbon Gap's work falls within our philanthropic strategy of scaling novel carbon dioxide removal and, more specifically, our sub-strategy of creating demand for CDR through compliance mechanisms and/or alternative demand mechanisms. Please see Giving Green's strategy report for more information, including potential risks and co-benefits, recommended sub-strategies, theory of change, funding need, and key uncertainties.

Last updated: October 2026

What Is Carbon Gap?

Launched in 2021, Carbon Gap builds the policy foundations that durable carbon removal needs to scale in Europe. It organizes its work around three pillars—demand for removals, their supply, and the governance and standards that determine what counts as a removal. Seeing demand as the sector's binding constraint, it concentrates its current priorities on the first pillar. It works primarily through direct engagement with policymakers and the elected officials who ultimately must approve its proposals, and it supports the wider carbon removal community with tools, reports, and analysis. The European Union is its main lever and where most of its resources sit; it also engages directly in the U.K., France, Germany, and the Nordics.

Two features distinguish it from other organizations working on European climate policy: It focuses only on CDR rather than taking on a broader remit, which allows sustained specialist engagement on technical policy files, and it is philanthropically funded rather than industry-backed, so it can take science-led positions across the political spectrum.

What Are We Funding, and How Could It Help Address Climate Change?

CDR provides a way to reach net-zero emissions if other climate strategies fail, and in the long run can remove legacy emissions from the atmosphere. A major bottleneck for CDR is demand: The voluntary market that started the sector is unlikely to carry it much further, and policy-driven demand is the alternative. We think Europe is a promising geography to build demand because its climate policies cover hard-to-abate emissions.

Carbon Gap’s demand-focused policy files include:

• Emissions trading systems: Integrating durable removals into the EU and U.K. systems, which would form the world's largest compliance-driven market for CDR.
• Purchasing mechanisms: The CDR Buyers Club, which pools private purchases alongside those of governments, and direct public procurement of removals in Germany and at the EU level.
• Sectoral mandates: Building CDR into mandates for hard-to-abate sectors, particularly aviation.

The next one to two years will see these mechanisms settled in law. If they land well, they could generate demand at the scale that makes bankable long-term offtake contracts, and therefore financed removal projects, possible. 

Why Do We Think Carbon Gap Will Use This Funding Well?

Carbon Gap has a track record on the specific files it now proposes to work on. It co-designed the EU CDR Buyers Club alongside the European Commission, which is expected to be operational by the end of 2026, and it secured substantive improvements to the EU's Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming regulation, which defines what counts as a removal in the EU. Carbon Gap estimates that two-thirds of its recommendations for an EU CDR strategy have materialized or are on track.

We see Carbon Gap as a leading organization driving policy-driven CDR demand in Europe, and this work is hard to fund elsewhere. CDR philanthropy has contracted since 2024 as major funders exited climate or reprioritized, and what remains has gone disproportionately to science and innovation rather than to building demand. Our research finds the need particularly acute in Europe. We believe Carbon Gap's exclusive focus on CDR policy, its independence from commercial interests, and its demonstrated ability to embed its recommendations in Europe's policy architecture position it well to turn this window into durable demand for carbon removal.

We publish grant spotlights to offer transparency to Giving Green Fund donors and resources for those interested in the impact strategies each grant supports. Giving Green believes our Top Climate Nonprofits have the greatest impact potential for large, unrestricted gifts. For several reasons, we also disburse and recommend grants to other organizations surfaced through our research process for work that we believe is at least as impactful as grants to our top recommendations. 

This is a non-partisan analysis (study or research) and is provided for educational purposes.

Carbon Gap is a registered nonprofit (charity) in the United Kingdom.