This week, Carbon180’s Making Waves Coastal Community Regranting Initiative made Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas list. The list honors projects and organizations working to make the world safer, cleaner, more sustainable, and more fair. Carbon180 is proud to be included on this list.
The win comes at a time when policy, research, and private-sector interest in marine carbon removal (mCDR) is expanding, but important questions about governance, community agency, and ecosystem impacts remain unresolved. There’s a lot we still don’t know about how mCDR affects ocean ecosystems and the communities tied to them. When you’re testing new approaches in waters people fish and live by, that uncertainty is a responsibility, not a footnote. Scale it wrong and you can’t undo it.
What Making Waves actually does
We started Making Waves last year to put coastal communities in charge of how early mCDR exploration happens near them. And we wanted to ensure that communities were part of the process right at the beginning. Not as an afterthought, but right from the get-go. Making Waves supports regionally diverse teams with funding, technical support, and the room to decide for themselves what mCDR should look like in their own waters, if anything.
We named our first cohort in October 2025: three community-based organizations, each receiving $100,00 a year for two years:
- The CLaM project in Alaska is bringing fishers, Indigenous groups, and marine scientists to the same table. They’re running roundtables in Kodiak and Prince William Sound, two regions that already know what environmental damage costs, to build policy recommendations for how mCDR should be governed.
- ʻĀina Momona in Hawaiʻi is surveying fishers, cultural practitioners, and young people across the state to find out what people actually know and think about mCDR. You can’t ground a project in community input if you’ve never measured where the community stands.
- ISER Caribe in Puerto Rico is folding mCDR into conservation work they’re already doing, training community members to run a mangrove nursery and restore coastline.
Since then, we’ve worked closely with each of our grantees to share knowledge, conduct site visits, and begin building new frameworks for approaching and evaluating mCDR.
Building mCDR to last
Since its infancy, the mCDR conversation belonged to academics and private developers. The people who know these waters best, and who’ll feel the effects first, were mostly left out of it. That’s not the way it should be, and we intended to fix it.
Scaling mCDR requires us to cultivate long-term public trust. Projects become more durable when the people around them helped shape them. When Indigenous knowledge, fishers’ experience, cultural practice, and residents’ priorities are built into the design instead of consulted at the end, we know mCDR development will be done the right way.
With Making Waves we’re working with communities to set the baseline. What does equitable, locally grounded mCDR look like? What does carbon removal more broadly owe the places it lands in? Communities are answering those questions, and we’re following their lead.
The bigger picture
We need carbon removal at gigaton scale to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. mCDR can help get us there, and when done right it can do more than pull legacy carbon out of the atmosphere. It can bring jobs and opportunity to coastal communities and make life there better. But only if those communities are the architects of it, not the recipients of whatever gets handed down.
That’s our mission with Making Waves, and we’re honored to be recognized by Fast Company and excited for the work ahead.