One question has followed CORE from the beginning: how should the framework apply to interventions that are still early-stage or that were never designed as carbon removal in the first place?
That tension is understandable. Early-stage projects and programs are not developed to make climate claims, sell credits, or count toward climate goals, which is the scope of CORE. Instead, these interventions focus on research, demonstration, and pilot-scale deployment where meaningful uncertainty still exists around whether they can achieve significant climate impact.
In these cases, CORE is often more useful as a direction than as a gate.
Early-stage projects and programs still shape the infrastructure, governance structures, incentives, and assumptions that future carbon removal interventions will inherit. A pilot project may never generate a credited ton of carbon removal. A monitoring platform may not remove carbon directly. A land stewardship program may not frame itself as CDR at all. But each can still shape whether future carbon removal interventions are accountable, transparent, and durable.
So, how do we think about applying CORE in these contexts?
Building CORE into Early-Stage Interventions
At early stages, CORE principles should not be treated as outcome requirements. They should be treated as design questions.
The better question isn’t ‘Does this intervention meet the CORE principles?’ It’s ‘How is this intervention being shaped so that it can meet the CORE principles in the future?’
This requires reframing how each principle is applied.
Inclusion: Who is shaping direction now?
Inclusion is often deferred or considered as something to be addressed at deployment. But early-stage decisions determine what gets built, where, and for whom.
If communities are not involved in shaping those decisions, then the intervention may have difficulty earning social license with local stewards and communities in the future. As the framework notes, exclusion early in the process can limit an intervention’s access to important regional and Traditional ecological knowledge, weaken accountability, and constrain participation over time.
At early stages, inclusion means asking:
- Who is involved in defining the problem and potential solutions?
- Do the people who should be involved have the resources, authority, and standing to actually shape decisions, including the ability to push back?
- Whose knowledge is being incorporated or excluded? And how will that knowledge be stored and attributed?
Transparency: What assumptions are being made?
In early-stage work, transparency is less about reporting outcomes and more about exposing uncertainty.
What is assumed about:
- Public perception of this intervention?
- Climate impact?
- Costs and scalability?
- Environmental and social risks?
- Whether existing legal and regulatory protections for communities and the environment are strong enough to do the job?
Making these assumptions visible and understandable creates the conditions for informed decision-making later. Without this, early narratives and assumptions can harden into unquestioned truths.
Accountability: Who is responsible for what is being shaped?
Research and development still produces decisions that shape future interventions.
Accountability at this stage is often diffuse:
- Who is responsible for research direction?
- Who is responsible for the consequences of early design choices?
- Who is involved in making and finalizing assumptions?
- Who is accountable if assumptions prove wrong?
If responsibility is not defined early, it becomes much harder to assign later, especially once interventions scale and actors multiply.
Net negativity: Are we designing toward real removal?
Early-stage interventions should not claim net negativity. But they should still be designed with it in mind.
This means considering:
- Lifecycle emissions
- System boundaries
- Dependencies on energy, materials, and infrastructure
Many integrity failures originate from early design decisions that lock in emissions or exclude key sources.
When Carbon Removal is Not the Point
CORE also applies differently to interventions that are not designed as carbon removal. In these cases, CORE is a relevance test.
Two questions matter:
- Are we enabling future CORE-aligned carbon removal?
Governance systems, data infrastructure, and community engagement processes may not produce removals themselves, but they shape whether credible carbon removal is possible later. - Are we implicitly making carbon claims?
Even when carbon removal is framed as a co-benefit, it can influence funding, perception, and decision-making. CORE helps clarify when it’s appropriate to treat those outcomes as meaningful carbon contributions.
A Practical Way to Use CORE
For early-stage and non-climate-relevant work, CORE can be applied through a simple set of questions:
- Does this decision make CORE-aligned carbon removal more possible in the future?
- Does it avoid locking in interventions and assumptions that will prevent CORE alignment later?
- Are tradeoffs being made explicit and revisited over time?
Today’s early-stage interventions become tomorrow’s mature ones. The assumptions, governance structures, and incentives established now will shape what carbon removal becomes later. The key question is whether an intervention is helping build carbon removal that can credibly align with those principles over time.