Equity & Justice in Carbon Removal: Evolving and Broadening Our Work
Today, we’re reintroducing Carbon180’s Environmental Justice Team as the Equity & Justice Team.
To us, equity and justice are related but distinct commitments. Equity focuses on addressing uneven burdens and opportunities within existing systems, ensuring that people most affected by carbon removal have meaningful access to information, participation, and benefits. Justice goes further: it is about transforming the structures that produce inequity in the first place.
Together, these concepts better capture the range of work required to ensure carbon removal contributes to real climate action. They also provide a framework that is globally relevant, recognizing that carbon removal will be deployed in diverse political, economic, and cultural contexts.
What this shift means
In short, the work itself isn’t changing. Environmental justice work is grounded in place-based organizing and community leadership. Many of our partners are doing this work within their communities day in and day out. We see our role as supporting, resourcing, and learning from that leadership — not substituting for it. We’re committed to capacity-building through our regranting efforts, and creating spaces for communities, scientists, and policymakers to shape decisions together.
This shift better articulates the other part of our work more clearly. We also focus deeply on the rules and broader systems: the policies, funding structures, and standards — that determine whether carbon removal is done responsibly. That includes advancing policies that champion community leadership, influencing how projects are evaluated and purchased, and co-developing frameworks that set expectations for accountability and transparency.
This change reflects both humility and clarity. Humility, because environmental justice is a movement with leadership that does not sit within organizations like ours. And clarity, because our work has expanded to include shaping institutional norms, influencing procurement and finance practices, and contributing to global governance and climate justice conversations about how carbon removal should be deployed responsibly.
Where we started
When Carbon180 first began integrating environmental justice into our work in 2020, it was because we saw a glaring gap. Carbon removal was advancing quickly, but there was little intentional focus on how projects would affect communities and existing inequities. Environmental justice offered an essential grounding — both as a social movement and as a way of thinking about power, participation, and accountability.
But as our work has evolved, so has our understanding of how to describe it. Increasingly, it became clear that “environmental justice” alone wasn’t fully capturing the scope of what we do day-to-day.
Environmental justice carries deep and specific meaning. It is rooted in decades of organizing, scholarship, and place-based struggle, particularly in the United States. While our work intersects with this tradition and is shaped by it, much of what we do operates across global systems, markets, governance structures, and policy contexts that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of EJ practice.
At the same time, the political landscape around equity, justice, and environmental action has shifted dramatically. In recent years, environmental justice programs have been rolled back, climate investments reframed through partisan lenses, and equity itself increasingly treated as a political signal rather than a practical necessity. These shifts do not change the realities on the ground. Carbon removal projects will still be built in real places, affecting real people and ecosystems, and will need public acceptance to thrive.
Looking ahead
This evolution in naming is not a departure from a commitment to environmental justice. It is an effort to be honest about our role in a rapidly changing field. Expanding to equity and justice allows us to engage more fully with the systemic, global, and institutional dimensions of the work ahead.
For our community partners, this doesn’t change how we show up. We remain committed to long-term, trust-based partnerships. What we hope to do more explicitly is connect that work to the bigger picture: the systems that ultimately determine outcomes at scale.
Carbon removal will only succeed if it earns trust – across political contexts, geographies, and communities. That requires more than technical credibility. It requires governance, accountability, and a commitment to improving lives, not reproducing harm.
Equity and justice aren’t side considerations in this field. They’re design principles, and we’d like to see more organizations treat them that way. This work is collective: building a field where climate action is shaped with communities, not just deployed around them.
Edited by Jason Aul.