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project details

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Project

Research Area

Technology & Innovation Management

Project Status

Completed

Start Date

Jan, 2022

Project Team

Rosebella Nyumba

Project Overview

As Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) makes efforts to achieve its development goals as per the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the region faces the difficulty of reaching these ambitions while maintaining the global requirement of net zero emissions. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is an innovative solution that can lead to potential job opportunities and help achieve the net zero goal. The carbon removal approaches can generate carbon removal credits, which can be traded internationally and are not typical carbon offsets, as CDR credits tend to have high durability and additionality.

Given the nascent nature of the CDR ecosystem in SSA, our project aims to accelerate SSA’s CDR startup ecosystem in three steps by, first, identifying CDR technologies and parts of the value chain with the highest potential for domestic socio-economic benefits, and second, assessing the readiness across three archetypical SSA countries to understand the broad potential across the region, and third, run a 6-months, structured CDR startup accelerator (in two separate batches) dedicated to the key technologies and bottlenecks identified

Objectives

Based on the challenges and overall description above, this project intends to achieve the following objectives through the implementation of three work packages:

Identify 5 CDR technologies with the highest potential for localization, commercial potential (i.e. the potential market volume and price) and gender equality and social inclusion aspects
Create a country diagnostic framework for CDR readiness across the top 5 technologies identified & implement it on three archetypical countries
Implementation of a modified SusTec accelerator program in 2 cohorts with the combination of local and remote coaching on relevant topics

Methodologies

The project will make use of qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve its outlined objectives which will include:

A systematic literature review to better grasp the role, potential and overall effect of CDR in SSA to inform criteria used for the localization, commercial potential and socio-economic aspects
10-15 expert elicitation interviews to fill the potential gaps in the literature
Carry out a country diagnostic framework survey to assess country readiness coupled with further interviewing of respondents

Expected Outputs

Under this project, the consortium will hold a kick-off workshop in Kenya with CDR stakeholders
The project will also hold two cohorts of a startup accelerator which will be a combination of local and remote coaching with a base in Kenya with a targeted total of 24 startups
3 Published white papers for each work package, any additional research papers and possible policy recommendations for the CDR startup ecosystem
Country diagnostic framework from the survey