After years of anticipation, the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market is beginning to gain the regulatory clarity it needs to scale. Two recent standards announcements mark an important step forward, offering stakeholders greater confidence to invest in, develop, and transact CDR credits.
The most significant of these arrived at the end of January, when the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol released its long-awaited Land Sector and Removals (LSR) Standard. For a market still struggling with questions of credibility, traceability, and permanence, this new framework provides a firmer foundation for the next phase of growth.
The LSR Standard was developed by the GHG Protocol, the world’s leading framework for measuring, managing, and reporting greenhouse gas emissions across corporate operations and value chains. The standard guides how companies account for greenhouse gas emissions and removals linked to land use, land use change, and carbon storage.
The LSR Standard sets out consistent rules for tracking biogenic carbon across landscapes, products, and value chains. It also keeps a strong emphasis on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV).
By improving traceability and transparency, especially land-based carbon dioxide removal pathways, the LSR Standard aims to strengthen the overall credibility of reported removals. Doing so provides greater confidence for investors, regulators, and carbon market participants interested in investing in the technology.
At its core, the LSR Standard establishes clearer rules for tracking,measuring, and verifying biogenic CO₂ across land-based carbon removal pathways. It formally reinforces the importance of MRV systems, particularly for quantifying carbon pools and tracing biogenic value chains.
This clarity is especially important for large-scale,capital-intensive CDR projects. Without robust, widely accepted standards,developers face uncertainty that can deter investment in technologies such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and other biogenic sequestration approaches. The LSR Standard helps reduce that uncertainty by setting clear expectations upfront.
Spanning 133 pages, the standard outlines three primary usecases for carbon traceability in the land sector:
Together, these use cases aim to strengthen confidence in reported removals by making carbon flows from land to end use more transparent.
The LSR Standard applies to companies with significant land sector activities or exposure to geological CO₂ storage. In practice, this covers a wide range of market participants:
This broad scope reflects the interconnected nature ofland-based value chains and the need for consistency across them.
One notable clarification concerns recycled waste used as an input to CDR pathways. These materials are exempt from land-use change reporting requirements as they do not directly drive new land conversion.
However, the standard is explicit that such pathways must still demonstrate credibility. Companies must provide evidence that the waste is post-consumer and that it has genuinely been reused or recycled and not merely diverted from other productive uses.
While the LSR Standard does not resolve every challenge facing the CDR market, it represents a meaningful step toward maturity. By tightening rules around traceability and reinforcing MRV expectations, it helps create the conditions needed for larger, more durable investments in biogenic carbon removal.
For a sector long constrained by uncertainty, that shift may prove just as important as the removals themselves.