CRSI: Grantee Spotlight (Q3 2026)

The Giving Green Fund is awarding an unrestricted grant to CRSI (also known as the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative) for its work embedding carbon dioxide removal (CDR) into existing industries and the policies that govern them. CRSI is a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides technical assistance, cross-sector coordination, and capacity-building for carbon removal policy, with a focus on quantification and industrial integration.

CRSI's work falls within our philanthropic strategy of scaling novel carbon dioxide removal and, more specifically, our sub-strategies to (i) create demand for CDR through compliance mechanisms and/or alternative demand mechanisms, and (ii) improve measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) and set standards for novel CDR. 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: September 2026

What Is CRSI?

Founded in 2024 and based in the U.S., CRSI aims to accelerate the development and deployment of durable carbon removal by integrating CDR into existing physical and policy infrastructure. It launched with a focus on fit-for-purpose quantification—the methods that determine whether a removal can be credibly counted—and has since widened its scope to include fit-for-purpose policy, identifying which existing regulations and subsidy programs could support embedded carbon removal in a given industry and jurisdiction.

It calls this combination Find-Match-Measure: find opportunities to embed removal inside existing public and private infrastructure, match them to the regulatory and subsidy regimes that could pay for them, and measure the result with methods robust enough to support policy. CRSI is a small organization that works through published analysis, open databases, technical assistance, and, increasingly, convening the researchers, industries, and policymakers who would have to build these projects.

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

Most CDR effort to date has gone into standalone projects selling credits into carbon markets, which are under pressure to keep prices low, and whose potential demand falls well short of the removal volumes in modeled climate scenarios. Integrating removal into sectors such as agriculture, mining, and waste management instead uses existing infrastructure and policy levers, which could help achieve greater scale.

CRSI’s priorities for the next two years include:

• Feasibility and cost analysis: assessing the regulatory and cost barriers to integrated CDR projects in high-priority industries and jurisdictions.
• Quantification for open systems: extending its enhanced weathering monitoring work to more pathways, including how waterway alkalinity measurements could support carbon accounting in national inventories.
• Sector scoping: publishing scoping reports on the removal potential of industrial wastewater and other sectors with embedded CDR potential.
• Public data: expanding its database of CDR policies and quantification resources (C-QuIP) to cover more subnational policy.

Why Do We Think CRSI Will Use This Funding Well?

CRSI has converted our previous two grants into usable public work. In the past year, CRSI has:

• Completed the first stage of its Sectoral Integrations Feasibility Study, scoring 16 industry-pathway pairs across eight industries.
• Launched C-QuIP, which now holds 167 policies and 897 quantification resources.
• Published a guide to CDR policymaking for a net-negative world—a practitioner-informed roadmap for pathways that serve both coastal resilience and removal—with CarbonPlan, as well as several papers on enhanced weathering in agriculture, including in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

It is also unusually well connected for its size. Its executive director is a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology report covering CDR, due in 2027, which will underpin how removals are counted in national greenhouse gas inventories, and its senior team brings CDR policy experience spanning three U.S. administrations.

Standards and quantification remain among the least-funded parts of a shrinking field: CDR philanthropy has contracted since 2024, and our research finds that climate and CDR funders rarely focus on MRV and standard-setting. We believe CRSI's technical depth, its position between the CDR field and the industries it wants to reach, and its record of turning analysis into resources others use position it well to build the accounting foundations that policy-driven removal will require.

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.

CRSI is a sponsored project by Multiplier, a registered nonprofit in the United States.