The CRCF will be operational before the market is ready to supply its evidentiary requirements
Why this recipient benefits: Temple-West has explicitly been covering carbon-accounting opacity. Proof-pack disclosure is the operational answer to what his coverage has been documenting as the problem. A newsletter-length piece + a standalone feature can ride the CRCF readiness story his FT readership needs.
Why now: CRCF implementation gap is a 2026 capital-markets story that FT is best-positioned to report.
The ask: Off-the-record briefing on proof-pack implementation. We provide the schema, registry-operator integration status, and the investability analysis for CDR vintages.
The FT's Climate Capital franchise is where European capital allocators form opinions on CDR investability. The EU's Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF) is coming online. CRCF alignment via proof-pack-equivalent disclosure is the single largest EU market-access question.
Dear Editor,
The EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework has been drafted, negotiated, and is now entering implementation. The framework's operators at DG CLIMA, led by Christian Holzleitner's Land Economy and Carbon Removals unit, have been explicit about what they want: durable removals, quantified with a defensible methodology, delivered with evidence that an auditor can inspect.
On the supply side, the market is not ready to produce that evidence at scale. European project operators — in enhanced rock weathering, biochar, soil carbon, peatland restoration, and direct air capture — have methodology documents. They do not have a common per-tonne evidentiary artefact that maps cleanly onto CRCF requirements. The result, if current trajectories hold, will be an implementation gap in 2026 and 2027 that the US voluntary market's reputational crisis has already taught us is expensive to close retroactively.
A January 2026 paper in npj Climate Action by Christopher Reinhard and Noah Planavsky made the case for radical transparency on CDR data and cost. The authors argued that methodology, cost decomposition, and verification pathway should be open for every tonne. Trellison Institute has been building a reference implementation — a signed per-tonne record we call a proof pack — that operationalises that argument.
The CRCF is, in effect, the largest upcoming market for proof-pack-equivalent disclosure in the world. European project operators who produce records that can be mapped to CRCF requirements will issue credits into a regulated market. Operators that cannot will sell at a discount into the voluntary tail.
The FT Climate Capital reader is the allocator deciding whether to take long positions in CDR vintages or to remain in short-tenor offset wraps. That allocation decision depends on whether the underlying assets will earn CRCF qualification. Today, most of them will not, because they were developed before CRCF existed. The allocators who understand this will demand proof-pack-equivalent disclosure as an investment precondition.
We are not asking the FT to cover a specific instrument. We are arguing that the CRCF implementation gap is a capital-markets story that the FT is best-positioned to report. A coverage arc that treats CRCF readiness as an investability question would do more to close the gap than any amount of technical rulemaking.
— Rob Stillwell
Director, Trellison Institute
[email protected]