Coastal Resilience and oCDR with Carbon Removal Standards Initiative’s Dr. Gabby Kitch and Anu Khan

In this episode of Plan Sea, hosts Anna Madlener and Dr. Wil Burns sit down with Dr. Gabby Kitch and Anu Khan from the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI) —  a nonprofit organization using science and policy to unlock carbon dioxide removal (CDR) opportunities —  to break down their recently published roadmap, Our Coasts, Resiliency, and Carbon Dioxide Removal. The report identifies three coastal resilience pathways that offer possibility for alignment with ocean-based carbon dioxide removal.

Authors of the report, Dr. Kitch and Anu Khan, discuss three types of coastal resilience pathways identified in the roadmap: living shorelines, ecosystem restoration, and stormwater infrastructure. The report explores how these pathways could also offer integrations with carbon removal. The report includes case studies from four coastal states — Louisiana, California, North Carolina, and New Jersey — as well as insights from interviews with more than 40 coastal practitioners.

The report authors also explain that 40% of Americans live in coastal counties, making coastal resilience an evolving and necessary field. Across states, resilience infrastructure is expanding, but the authors emphasized that monitoring systems remain underfunded and how permitting processes vary across regions. Integrating CDR, however, can provide an opportunity for assessing its feasibility, standardizing monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV), while also leveraging investments to accelerate learning across the field. This builds on the concept of “sectoral integration,” which reframes CDR as a co-benefit rather than a standalone industry. 

Our guests also emphasize the importance of incorporating environmental justice into project design. They spotlight the need for early and meaningful community engagement, co-developing projects for local benefits, using culturally-relevant outreach strategies, and respecting Indigenous rights. Looking ahead, they note that integrated projects are becoming the norm by necessity, and continuing in this trend can position coastal resilience as a case for knowledge sharing across the field.  

Plan Sea is a semi-weekly podcast exploring ocean-based climate solutions, brought to you by the Carbon to Sea Initiative and the American University Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal.

ACRONYMS/CONCEPTS:

• CEQA: California Environmental Quality Act
• CPRA: Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
• CRSI: Carbon Removal Standards Initiative 
• mCDR: Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal 
• MRV: Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification
• NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 
• OAE: Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement

Plan Sea is a semi-weekly podcast exploring ocean-based climate solutions, brought to you by the Carbon to Sea Initiative & the American University Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal.

Transcript

00:13 - Introduction and Guest Overview

Wil (00:13): Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Plan Sea: Ocean Interventions to Address Climate Change. As always, I'm your host, Wil Burns, co-executive director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. And I'm joined by my co-host, Anna Madlener, senior manager for MRV at the Carbon to Sea Initiative. So today we're welcoming Dr. Gabby Kitch and Anu Khan to discuss their recently published roadmap, Our Coasts, Resiliency and Carbon Dioxide Removal: A Practitioner-Informed Roadmap for Enhancing Coastal Resilience and CDR Potential Along the U.S. Coastline. Gabby is a Navigation Fund Fellow at the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, or for short, CRSI, as well as the marine CDR lead at the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. She was previously the marine CDR lead at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association, NOAA, in the United States, and holds a PhD in Geological and Earth Sciences from Northwestern University. Anu is the founder and executive director of CRSI. Before CRSI, Anu led the science innovation team at Carbon 180, a DC-based CDR policy think tank. Together, they've been working on a project examining opportunities to turn coastal resilience projects into mitigation efforts, which has recently culminated in the aforementioned roadmap publication. They're here today to tell us more about the motivation, background, and key insights of this roadmap. What are you looking forward to today, Anna? 

Anna (1:50): I'm excited to look at CDR from this kind of new angle and perspective. We've not talked that much, I think, in the podcast or generally about these sort of non-carbon crediting approaches for implementing CDR projects and so I'm curious to hear more about where we're at in that regard and how feasible and realistic it is. And as always, one of the promises or opportunities that they've mentioned in the report in integrating these CDR projects in mitigation efforts is to advance monitoring reporting and verification practices or for short, MRV, without, I suppose, the burden of carbon crediting, but I'm curious to dive a bit deeper into that and how that would really look, if that's possible to extend etc. 

Wil (2:46): Yeah, those are very important points. You know, an ongoing theme for me is how do we keep the CDR sector viable at a time where it faces a lot of headwinds, right? How do we keep the key personnel in place that we're going to need moving forward? And one of the things that is frequently being discussed, especially in the last year, is the viability of incorporating CDR approaches into existing infrastructure to help us remain viable and grow, and also the potential for synergisms or co-benefits inside existing sectors as a way of ensuring that viability. And so I think the report really focuses on a good case study of potentially doing that. So I think it's really valuable. 

Anna (3:48): Yeah, lots to discuss with that. Shall we bring them in? 

Wil (3:51): Yes, let's do it. 

Anna (3:54): Hi Anu, hi Gabby, welcome to the podcast. Nice to see you. 

Anu (3:59): Hi, great to be here. 

Gabby (4:01): Hi, Anna. Hi, Wil. 

Wil (4:03): All right, hi, Gabby. Hi, Anu. Let's start with a round of introductions. And also, can you tell us a bit about the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative before we dive deeper into the roadmap? 

Anu (4:16): Yeah, absolutely. So I can kick us off. I'm Anu. I am the Executive Director of the Carbon Renewable Standards Initiative or CRSI for short. So my background is in electrochemistry and then climate philanthropy. And then I landed at Carbon 180 in about 2021 and got really interested in questions about MRV and accountability and kind of started going down this rabbit hole of how do we know that we're actually doing what we say we're doing? How do we trust this work in a way that's really going to build public confidence and build to large scale public policy. And what I learned in that period of time really thinking about MRV is that there isn't one standard to rule them all. As much as I wish that there was, that we could just be like, we all agreed, this is the set of rules. It became pretty clear that all of this work around standardization in MRV needed to be very context specific. And then the question becomes, what is the context in which we are trying to scale carbon removal? What is the policy lever? What is the jurisdiction? What is the sector in which you're operating? And so today at CRSI, our work is really focused on understanding carbon removal integrations into other sectors, parts of the economy and societal goals, and how we can leverage those in order to do carbon removal well with the appropriate policies and rules in place. Which is how Gabby and I ended up coordinating on this project. 

Gabby (5:36): So my background is in geochemistry and when I was finishing up my technical training, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I come from a family of public servants and so I was definitely looking to get more involved in happenings in the kind of climate crisis and that's where I landed on a great fellowship opportunity in marine policy. So I ended up applying to that, amongst many other things. Got into public service that way. So I was placed with NOAA's ocean acidification program and focused on international policy for a year. During my technical training, we spent a lot of time discussing carbon dioxide removal within our lab group. It's kind of  an intersection point for our laboratory group. And so we, when I first came into NOAA, we were discussing marine carbon dioxide removal, and I was really excited. I think this was day one that I got an email and I was like, well, what are we doing on marine carbon dioxide removal? And our deputy director at the time was like, you're interested in this? Great, we're going to put you on all of these different things. So while I was working with an international policy portfolio, I also took up a lot of the marine carbon-dioxide removal work and started supporting a lot of that and there was a role open to really step into more of leading that research portfolio, so I got a lot of experience at the policy interface for marine carbon dioxide removal. And while that chapter came to a close last year, I was having a lot of really great discussions with folks in the field, Anu being one of those people, and she was talking about these sectoral integrations. And I walked away from that conversation with Anu being really excited about these different types of integrations, certainly something that we had been thinking about in NOAA and certainly funding different opportunities, say on  wastewater and things like that with marine carbon dioxide removal. But when we were talking, Anu and I, about these public sector integrations, that's something that really got me thinking and going. And so when this grant opportunity came up to think about really a wide-reaching scope of things, anything climate-related that's a discrete project, a six-month project, I came back to ANU and said, should we look at this in a marine crime and dioxide removal context? And that's kind of how the Coastal Resilience Integration Report, or roadmap, was born. 

Anu (8:10): Yeah, and quick shout out to the Navigation Fund for supporting that work.

8:15 - Motivation Behind the Roadmap

Anna (08:15): Yeah, I think it was one week ago or two weeks ago or so when another awesome player in this field, Noah Deich, wrote in his newsletter that mCDR giant Gabby Kitch is out with a new report. So that felt pretty accurate. And I'm super excited to have both of you on the podcast, finally. I think we've been talking about some version of both of you on this podcast for quite some time. So it's a great opportunity. You already alluded to, of course, your journey to this point in time a little bit, but do you want to share more about some of the motivation that went into writing the report and perhaps some of the scope of it as well? 

Gabby (08:56): Yeah, great. I can talk a bit more about that. So, like I mentioned, the roadmap was really born out of these conversations about sectoral integrations and public benefits around sectoral integrations. And this roadmap in particular is really the initial answer to the question, can resilience infrastructure deliver mitigation benefits as well? And how does that even happen? So. What this really means is looking at carbon dioxide removal as a co-benefit to projects rather than the mean kind of impetus for a standalone project. And I think this is really promising because it involves projects that are already moving forward today. And so the roadmap, the way that we've outlined it, explores three different types of coastal resilience pathways, which I'm sure we'll get into in a little bit. And explores these different pathways and four different case studies. And this is really focused on the US, but we can talk about how this applies more broadly as well. The focus is on abiotic CDR or carbon dioxide removal and largely ocean alkalinity enhancement or OAE. And... I'll just flag that the product would not have been possible without a lot of really great coastal resilience practitioners that were open to my often kind of cold outreach where I interviewed over 40 different practitioners across U.S. Coastal states and then did additional research on different policies and pathways. Anu, did you want to highlight what the report doesn't do? 

Anu (10:32): Yeah, in terms of scoping, I know we've gotten this question a few times since the report launched, but the report, as Gabby mentioned, was really intended to bridge knowledge gaps between the CDR community and the coastal practitioner community at a very exploratory level. So what is a biotic marine carbon removal for a coastal practitioner? How does a coastal practitioner think about something like carbon removal? So there's a lot of things on the sort of technical feasibility side that we haven't captured yet. A specific one that we asked about a lot is CDR potentials. And so one thing that at CRSI we're doing going forward across a range of integrations is trying to develop these really rough estimates of total CDR potentially. And as you're reading or the report, you might go in there and find, oh, but how much exactly? And I think there's a lot of open questions there, and that's something that really deserves its own dedicated piece of work. So, something to flag in terms of scope. 

11:29 - Coastal Resilience Explained: Pathways and Importance 

Anna (11:29): That makes sense. So let's dive into that a little bit. Before we sort of dissect the individual pathways and their suitability with CDR integration, tell us a bit about why coastal resilience is a key topic and problem in the climate conversation. 

Gabby (11:47): Absolutely. So coastal resilience and what I really mean by resilience in this report is the ability for communities to come back from kind of climate pressures, from extreme weather events, etc. And of course, these communities are based on the coastline. And over 40% of the US population lives in coastal counties, so it definitely supports quite a bit of population. And these coastal economies support trillions of US dollars in activity every year, very diverse kinds of economies based on where you're at and in the US geographically. And these coastal counties are experiencing accelerated hazards with sea level rise, extreme weather. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, my former employer, tracks a lot of these different disasters in terms of the exact dollar amount. And so they have this metric called billion dollar disasters, which is just tracking the hazards that happen in the U.S. and which hazards and storms get past that billion dollar metric, which is quite a catastrophic dollar amount to any kind of community. And so the Office of Coastal Management has done this for the coastal states in particular. And there's been hundreds of unique billion dollar disasters since 2018, since they've started tracking these, over 400 different unique billion-dollar disasters. So these risks are just accelerating and the dollar amount associated with these risks is accelerating. So now there's a lot of investment in coastal resilience, right? The infrastructure that helps coastal communities come back faster from these different devastating impacts or even decrease the amount of economic and community impact that these events have. So it's a big field and will continue to grow in terms of coastal infrastructure. 

Anna (13:57): One of the many things that I'm looking forward to discussing today is also something that I think the CDR community knows very well, but often comes up is this sort of fear that CDR activity or CDR investments takes away from resilience projects or emission avoidance projects. So I'm really excited to talk about both of these in unison. What are exactly the types of resilience projects that you looked at in the report, and how do they work? 

Gabby (14:27): Yeah, happy to talk more about that. And I just want to touch on that little segue that you provided, Anna, because this also a strong motivator for the report is noticing in my public sector work, conversations about adaptation and mitigation were oftentimes happening in different rooms with different budget lines. And there's been a lot of kind of public spotlights on yes, we need to focus in on climate adaptation. Climate crisis is here, you know, that's where the dollars need to be going. And I think this report really questions us to say, but what if there are real opportunities where there's a strong bridge between the two and prioritize mitigation while doing adaptation? So for this report, we really focused in on three different types of resilience pathways, as we call them. So the first one is what's known as living shorelines. And living shorelines certainly are defined on a gradient within the coastal resilience community. We have everything from simply planting vegetation to stabilize shorelines. All living shorelines try to stabilize the coastline, right? So planting vegetation and then on the farthest side, what we call gray infrastructure or hardened infrastructure is our things like sea walls and those types of hard structures. Those would not be considered living shorelines, but there is a gradient in between those two end members, if you will, between planting vegetation and those really hardened infrastructure types where living shorelines can sit. So a lot of the ones that I've called out in the report are a mixture or kind of hybrid infrastructure projects, as the community calls them, where there is something that helps to break down wave energy, something that's called a living breakwater, so an oyster reef, some rocks, those types of things, where then vegetation is planted behind that structure to continue to stabilize the shoreline. So that's living shorelines broken down. The second pathway is ecosystem restoration, which many are familiar with. It's taking a degraded ecosystem, in this case on the coastline. And improving it so that it is fully functioning. And so a lot of these methods involve increasing the water flow so that salinity levels are improved in the ecosystem and those kinds of saltwater vegetation can grow back in the eco-system. Also grouped under here are other projects that are using a lot of sediment to build out new ecosystems, which we can certainly talk about later. If that's of interest, but oftentimes projects such as in Louisiana are using dredge sediments, so sediments that are off the coastline, in the Gulf area, dredging those and using those to create new ecosystems. The final pathway that we discuss is stormwater infrastructure. So this one may not be traditionally binned and coastal resilience per se. So I think it's a really interesting use case in the report. And what I mean by stormwater infrastructure for coastal communities are really the structures that help to combat compound flooding, which is an event where you have inland rainfall causing inundation, and then you also have sea level rise and increased like tides that work together to the coastal community's detriment, right, to create this compound flooding effect. And so stormwater infrastructure really ranges similar to living shorelines from those green solutions, retention ponds and wetlands and things like that, all the way to the more gray infrastructure, which are things similar to the retention ponds, detention ponds that are under the coastal communities and those would be made out of concrete, conveyance tunnels, things that work together with treatment infrastructure, those types of solutions. 

18:47 - Integrating Carbon Removal Into Existing Infrastructure 

Anna (18:47): Okay, cool. Thanks for the overview. And I guess, yeah, directly related, why are all three of these opportunities for integrating abiotic marine CDR approaches and how would that work? 

Gabby (18:59): So hopefully the longer introductions to the coastal resilience pathways to pinpoint the integrations a bit more smoothly. So in all of these different, especially living shorelines and ecosystem restoration, sediment is already being used. And so you can imagine sediment that's being used to fill on a regraded land before plotting vegetation or things like that, planting vegetation. Then you could imagine a case where alkaline material or things that would be utilized for mineral-based ocean alkalinity enhancement could be incorporated into that sediment and produce alkalinity. For ecosystem restoration, there are some blue carbon ecosystems that naturally produce alkalinities. So I think that's also a really interesting integration potential to keep an eye on. But overall, for all of these different types with infrastructure. Are projects that are already moving out in terms of funding being allocated to move forward these coastal resilience projects. For stormwater, there's a lot of money going into kind of retrofits and things like that. But a lot of the infrastructure is also created today. And for just to build on a little bit for the stormwater example and the integration potential there. While storms are certainly episodic, and so the water flow coming into those systems would be a bit more episodic. They are kind of contained systems where they could be accessed for monitoring, potential addition of alkaline materials, either whether that be mineral-based or aqueous and those types of things. 

Anna (20:43): And so the motivation it sounds like here is very much to, as you mentioned, make use of a project that is already funded, of infrastructure that's already installed, of monitoring efforts that are already ongoing. To many folks, the idea of marine CDR is often associated with the generation of carbon credits, or at least the quantification of carbon drawdown, whether that, I suppose, necessarily results in a credit or not, but I'm curious if you want to talk a little bit more about whether that is in the same vein or to the same extent the idea and goal of integrating it into these coastal resilience projects or whether it's a co-benefit that doesn't need to or doesn't have to undergo the same scrutiny for carbon quantification. 

Anu (21:37): So before we dive into carbon credits, which is a question I love and love ranting at people about, as you all know, I do want to mention one thing that I didn't expect and didn't fully appreciate until I got to join Gabby and some of these conversations with coastal resilience practitioners about why coastal resilience specifically is a really powerful integration. I think many of us in carbon removal, we're used to being the new kid on the block. We kind of assume that every other sector is much more developed. They've got their stuff together, they get it, like they're moving, they're trucking along. And that's the approach that I had going into the coastal resilience conversation was like, oh, they are already doing things and we can kind of be, you know, the kid sister that's like, hey, like, can we join? But what I've learned about coastal resilience is that this field is itself a really innovative approach to kind of conventional coastal planning, which is much more of your like hardened infrastructure and economic activity and things like that. And so embedding coastal resilience in coastal planning is an active area of innovation and change and dynamism and really folks who are. Both technical and public benefit minded trying to figure out like, okay, how do we actually do cost resilience? And so what I think Gabby and I both observed is a willingness and an openness to explore other benefits and other approaches because coastal resilience in itself is a really evolving and innovative field. And I think, you know, when we talk about integration, sometimes we're talking about like, you know, industries that have been operating in a certain way for 100 years and kind of like, how do we force the door open? That really hasn't been our experience with coastal resilience. Most folks have been really open to conversations in a way that's really cool, and I think it reflects that resilience itself is a dynamic field. 

Anna (23:23): Well, a question that beckons for me is, is itself then also vulnerable to the type of funding cuts or funding restraints that CDR is? And I mean, now we're kind of diverting from our line of questions here, but I'm curious as it's kind of related, I think, to the questions on carbon credits as well. Yeah, curious what your thoughts are there. 

Gabby (23:46): Yeah, I think certainly anything that is climate related has a bit of a question mark these days in terms of their funding lines, but I will say coastal communities are feeling these impacts, right? And so for states that are not necessarily wanting to fund climate related projects, they're certainly going to fund projects that protect their communities and their economies. And so I've been surprised how many states that aren't climate forward-leaning really invest in climate adaptation and coastal resilience projects. And so I do see perhaps some additional protection for these types. 

Anna (24:32): Yeah, that makes sense. 

Anu (24:33): Yeah, and kind of building on the carbon credits point, I think three things that are kind of top of mind, whenever we at CRSI talk to people about sector-specific integrations and opportunities. Big picture in the long run. I think most of us would agree we need a diverse set of policy mechanisms to support carbon removal and fund carbon removal at scale beyond compliance markets as they're currently designed and implemented. So compliance markets are great. We should do that. We should figure out how to do that well. And we kind of all know that it doesn't deliver sufficient volume in the Long Run. And so the question that we always want to ask is, okay, what is the next layer of sort of policy support mechanism? And so exploring things like sector-specific policies, how do you fund coastal resilience and adaptation, those kinds of things can help us build that kind of bigger picture. In the near term, and I think we've touched on this a couple of times already, when we talk about carbon removal, decarbonization or mitigation, adaptation, it's a little bit like that Spider-Man meme where they're all pointing at each other. I mean, do you have a pot of money over there that I can have access to? And the just unfortunate reality is the whole pie has to grow. There isn't like CDR money we can get from adaptation or adaptation money you can get from decarburization, we just need more funding for all of it, realistically. And then lastly, in the very near term, I think in carbon removal, we've all seen that voluntary buyers have been catalytic and have actually been really open to doing things that look a lot like research and, you know, like Stripe and Frontier, they just put out their most recent pre-purchase research grant. I think that actually just explicitly has a research grant in it now. So I think there will be, you know, for near-term CDR pilot projects, some element of, you know how do we think about this in the context of voluntary buyers and what they're looking for and that's also valuable because that's been catalytic. 

Gabby (26:28): Yeah, and just to add on to what Anu was saying, specifically about the kind of carbon credit. So the synthesis of that, I think, is that carbon credits are not necessarily a prerequisite of these integrations, but they certainly are possible. And the lead for these kinds of projects is to increase the public benefit that these types of projects offer. 

Anna (26:53): Yeah, we can dive a bit deeper when we maybe get to some of the MRB questions, but I think, over to Wil to ask a few good questions about the state studies in particular. 

27:03 - Case Studies and Key Findings Across U.S. States

Wil (27:03): Yeah, thanks Anna. So the heart of your report consists of case studies in four U.S. States. How did you choose these states to be the focus? 

Gabby (27:17): That's a great question, Wil, and this was a hard one and something that we definitely talked a lot about in our discussions, because I do think that across the US, and certainly across the globe, there are opportunities for these integrations in each geography. The four case studies that we highlight in this roadmap are Louisiana, California, North Carolina, and New Jersey. We had to narrow the scope of the roadmap in some way. And so these weighted criteria were really focused on what are some strong illustrative case studies where a dynamic kind of policy environment can be explored where we capture a range of different coastlines that can be applied and other states can kind of see themselves in those coastlines. And so. The way that we decided on these criteria was through the research process and the interview process and we can certainly talk about the waiting in more detail if you all would like, but they were based on a number of factors that include the policy and regulatory environments in each state, the economic drivers and the geographies of each state and then also the need, so talking about those billion-dollar disasters again. And the capacity, so the institutional capacity that each state has to offer. 

Anu (28:43): And as Gabby mentioned, we went back and forth on this throughout the project a few times, just really trying to think of what is the appropriate weighting and what kind of action does this enable for an audience to have this kind of more quantitative information. And one of the things that I thought was important to highlight is we ended up weighting the policy and regulatory factors quite heavily in choosing our final criteria and therefore what ended up being the highly ranked states for case studies. And this is really because broadly we're talking about the opportunity for abiotic mCDR integrations, but in practice what we were hoping for with this roadmap is to move towards research pilots that test this opportunity in real places. And we wanted to understand, you know, is this a policy environment that's going to enable the kind of research and exploratory work that we're thinking about. 

Wil (29:35): Yeah, I think that's a really important point, right? I think a lot of times there's emphasis on the technical potential and ignoring how critical the regulatory is to both facilitate and also protect the interests that are important to us, right, that go beyond carbon removal, like justice and equity. So I thought that was really good. Now, recognize that we can't dive into the analysis of every individual state. Are there any insights or recommendations that are shared across all of these case studies or maybe vice versa are particularly indicative of individual states? 

Gabby (30:19): Yeah, so I can speak a bit to this, and I'm going to lean towards the lessons learned across all of the states. As we've highlighted or maybe alluded to in previous discussions, is that resilience infrastructure is certainly expanding across all states. Where this might come from looks a little bit different in each state. It was really interesting to talk in fact to a lot of the Department of Transportation kind of state agencies and think about how they're funding resilience infrastructure and coming back to kind of like protecting the economic interests of each coastal state. So that's one point. The second point is that monitoring systems are often underfunded and a lot of projects struggle to see how to fund these monitoring projects and things like that, which is a point that I think we'll come to in some of the monitoring reporting and verification questions. And the third point is that permitting complexity varies greatly across all of these states. It was perhaps unsurprising, but we certainly did a lot of digging into the different kinds of permitting processes and even just looking, when I was doing my research, if I wanted to pursue a pilot project, how available is this information online, right? Even though I am a bit of an experienced user for my time in public policy, how would I navigate this process, and really using that as a first look into understanding the permitting regime and complexity and state. 

Wil (31:55): Yeah, I think that latter point, again, is really important. I think a lot of time, government entities forget that, right? And in this context, where we're talking about smaller companies with the limited sort of resources, right, having fairly ready access to that kind of information could be make or break in terms of them even looking at these kinds of enterprises, right. So it's definitely an important point for governments to remember and I guess us to, to try to help facilitate right as connective tissue. 

Gabby (32:35): I'm just gonna build on what you said, Wil, because I think it was a really great point about the connective tissue. So for that, I think that this is where learnings between the two communities, coastal resilience and CDR, that's another really strong connection there since the coastal resilience community has so much more experience, even though as Anu mentioned, it's a strongly innovative and certainly, there are still a lot of learnings. For the coastal resilience community in these projects, but they're doing the projects. They understand permitting timelines and permitting budgets, right? And what it takes to get a permit through and to really accelerate a project. So I think that's a really strong place for there to be connections between the coastal resilience and carbon dioxide removal community. 

Wil (33:30): With this in mind, what surprised you, if anything, during the analysis and deep dive in these case studies? 

Gabby (33:37): Yes, lots of surprises but I'll highlight two here and one maybe isn't too much of a surprise thinking about kind of the silos of adaptation and mitigation, but I was still taking back and talking to a lot of these practitioners about, you know, what goes into understanding the carbon footprint of these types of resilience projects. They often involve heavy machinery, judging those types of things, and most states aren't incentivized to look at that kind of aspect of the project whatsoever, and just thinking about getting the infrastructure out there. So of course, there are notable exceptions, I think in California, California has their California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA that certainly takes into account the full picture of the projects and those types of things, but I was really surprised and certainly people that have been in this space for a while are trying to advocate for that type of thinking to be included in grants and different funding streams and those types of things. But it just highlighted maybe how far the silo runs in these two types of fields. And then while I was engaging with a lot of the practitioners and attending some events on the ground, I think what surprised me is truly how these fields kind of mirror each other in terms of their interdisciplinary nature. I was sitting in a room listening to a panel about that was hosted by a public policy, so a state agency kind of moderator and they had an industry representative on the panel, they had an academic, they had, you know, a community outreach person and I was thinking to myself, this conversation is happening in a parallel. Universe to one that's happening in the carbon dioxide removal space right now. So I think that was a surprise as well. 

Wil (35:36): Yeah, lots of cross-learning. 

Anu (35:39): One quick surprise that I would add here, and this is me sort of following along with Gabby's interviews and kind of trying to learn about the space as well, I think in carbon removal, we know there's a huge breadth of different opportunities, as Gabby was saying, intradisciplinarity. Even within, when we narrow down to abiotic mCDR integrations within coastal resilience infrastructure, there's still a huge range of things that we're actually talking about from. Ecosystems that are, and even perceptions about types of projects, from things that are like really industrial coastal infrastructure, dredging is very common, use of heavy equipment is very common to things that are perceived as being very pristine ecosystems and just are very different. Approach overall. And so I think maybe not a huge surprise, but something that I'm always thinking about in the context of CDR is even when we try to narrow it down to what feels like a pretty specific integration, we're still really talking about a wide range of activities and stakeholders. 

Wil (36:47): At least one of the states that you highlight in the study, Louisiana, has a questionable coastal regulatory system. If you look at Louisiana in general, it's the folks that brought us Cancer Alley. It's brought us massive amounts of lawsuits over the years, especially from the environmental justice community in terms of what I feel are fairly lax. Regulatory purview and standards when it comes to vested economic interests. And so with that context in mind, should we have confidence that states such as Louisiana can adequately assess the potential impacts of ocean alkalinity enhancement, much less when it's integrated into the complicated pastiche of ocean resiliency or coastal resiliency programs. 

Gabby (37:46): Louisiana certainly has a complicated history with many different ocean users and ocean economies and those types of things. I will highlight from the ecosystem kind of side of things, Louisiana has certainly been a leader and there are different types of projects moving forward by necessity, right? We include in the report that Louisiana loses about a football field's worth of their shoreline every 100 minutes, I think is the limit there. So certainly by necessity, they are pursuing innovative ecosystem restoration techniques. So they've pursued, since the late 90s, almost 40 different marsh creation projects that have moved forward in the state, so certainly the most of any kind of US coastal state in that regard. They have a long history of sediment management and best practices for dredging and those types of things will, as you mentioned, maybe those kind of practices come under closer scrutiny in other states, but certainly I don't think we should discount the learnings from how much they have done in this space because they certainly have done. A lot of projects on the ground. And they do have a number of different programs. So in the 90s, they passed their Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act, or CWPRA. And then post Hurricane Katrina and Rita in about 2005, they passed the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, or CPRA. And our discussions with the CPRA, they have been super active in the space. They're really collaborative. They're looking, they just published a report on their kind of blue carbon and coastal ecosystems, potential for carbon credits and those types of things. So I think they are leading in a lot of these conversations and certainly. Increased connectivity with the carbon dioxide removal space, I think, could benefit conversations around environmental justice where people in this space are thinking really proactively about that. So there's more I could say there, but I'll leave it at that. 

40:11 - MRV, Environmental Justice and Future Directions

Anna (40:11): Thanks. And speaking of environmental justice, there are two big topics that you discuss in your roadmap. One is environmental justice and one is monitoring, reporting and verification and how these projects could, I guess, support MRV practices and how they must include good environmental justice practices. I want to touch on MRV a bit first. There is one I think in the report when you introduce this. Where I stumbled over a sentence that I was wondering if you can elaborate on a little bit. You were saying that integrating CDR-MRV into coastal resilience projects may enhance the ability to cross-compare resilience pathways by increasing standardization. Yeah, I'm curious if you want to talk a bit more about that and standardization, how, would be sort of worked on here. 

Gabby (41:05): Yeah, absolutely. So, I've mentioned a number of times that resilience projects are certainly monitored, but finding budget lines for those monitoring efforts are a bit tricky. There are some states that are now pushing for required monitoring, states like New Jersey with their living shorelines, recent guidelines and things like that, to require monitoring across projects. But I think the dual impact of the lack of requirements... Plus the kind of difficulties around funding have prevented synthesis studies from really being able to highlight cross learnings and different projects. So even, you know, living shoreline projects, but also across pathways. So comparing something like living shorelines to ecosystem restoration and those types of things. And so what I'm really thinking about here is building in more consistency and standardization for monitoring across coastal resilience projects to allow for this kind of inner comparison. And thinking about standardization of measurements is really something that the ocean carbon community and now the carbon removal community is leaning, leaning on and leaning into, maybe because of the carbon crediting conversation and those types of things. But I think it goes beyond that when thinking about the broader ocean carbon community. So I see a lot of these learnings from carbon dioxide removal and kind of the fields that predate the sector being a strong learning opportunity for the coastal resilience community and something that the carbon dioxide removal community can offer as a learning. 

Anna (42:54): That's a really interesting perspective. I guess I think I stumbled upon the sentence, because I feel that at least marine CDR MRV is also still in need of standardization, right? So what you're saying here is that from marine CDR MRV, the coastal resilience pathways can learn how to standardize. And I can definitely see how they can both inform each other and learn as perhaps the drive for standardization is stronger for MRV. Do you have any insight or hunch at how far the type of monitoring for coastal resilience efforts actually overlaps with the type of parameters and scope and frequency of monitoring for, I guess, CDR and how they would really overlap?

Gabby (43:49): I think this would be a really great next step in terms of a short kind of synthesis report, outlining how monitoring for each of these different pathways happens. Of course, some of those details are included in the roadmap, but there's not necessarily a dedicated section to that. It's more just for use in the illustrative key studies and the things and how to best incorporate the carbon and ecosystem monitoring into those components. I don't see it necessarily being like, okay, this coastal resilience monitoring framework checks every single box for carbon accounting and for ecosystem monitoring, certainly not. Otherwise, we would have answered all of these questions already. But I do think that there can be a lot of the human capacity and tools that could be leveraged for dual purposes. 

Anna (44:43): And somewhat relatedly, you mentioned that some of the potential sites may not yet be suitable for actually generating carbon credits because of limited scale or I think significant uncertainties in that particular location. Now, I think one could argue that that might be true for any project in reality at the moment, even those that are already implementing or sort of piloting carbon crediting, right? There was still uncertainty and they're still quite limited in scale. So do you have a sense for how many projects would realistically fall under that category right now? 

Anu (45:21): I think given the sort of exploratory stage of some of the work that we're talking about, I want to take a step back from the question of would this specific project or integration be suitable for carbon crediting? Because to be honest, we don't know. What is the buyer using the credit for? Under what regulatory regime are they doing this? In the US, there's basically no regulatory regime for assessing credits, except in some specific states' compliance markets. So I'm stepping back from that, and I kind of want to ask the question, can this project generate societal benefits? And I can think of that in a few different ways, which might include, can this project help us learn about carbon removal processes in a way that is safe and environmentally responsible? Can this learning contribute to decarbonization and net zero goals? Can this project and learning contribute to landscape level drawdown of carbon, which may require lower precision or larger scale monitoring. And I think our sense from the roadmap and the research that Gaby has been doing is that these kinds of pilots can help us achieve mostly on the learning side things that will help us to achieve the decarbonization and drawdown goals in the future. And again, sort of funding through credits is just kind of one way to fund these learning opportunities in the near term. But all of that to say, hard to answer like what exactly makes a crediting project right now, as you know as well as anyone. But just to flag, CRSI, we put out a report with Carbon Plan quite recently on how to think about goal setting for carbon removal projects, specifically in a policy design context. And so if anyone wants to really dig into the nuance there, I'm happy to talk more about that. 

Anna (47:01): Yeah, I think that's a great point, right? I mean, generally the significant uncertainties should be a target for learning rather than not doing anything at all, right. So that makes sense. 

Gabby (47:12): There's a lot in terms of the coastal resilience integrations for these learnings for the pilot project stage. So thinking about monitoring reporting and verifications, field testing models and stress testing models, environmental measurements, as well as operational processes for mineral-based and aqueous OAE or ocean alkalinity enhancement. So I think this really provides a bridge to scaling for marine carbon dioxide removal by leveraging the projects that are already moving forward. So while the scale for each kind of project for carbon crediting is certainly variable and may be a question mark that folks can certainly work on if they so choose and so please, I think keeping in mind that the scale potential for ocean alkalinity enhancement is large and that these could be great sites for opportunities for learning. 

Wil (48:07): We all obviously agree that MRV is a critical aspect of OAE in general and certainly in cooperation and these kinds of projects. But one question I have is, are you confident that MRV can be conducted in such a fashion as to, you know, one, give us confidence that we're getting what project developers are claiming and just as importantly not in unduly increase the expense of coastal resilience projects to the point where they either kick us out of the clubhouse or it potentially imperils the projects themselves. 

Gabby (48:48): It's a great question, Wil, and MRV can be expensive. In any kind of ocean alkalinity enhancement projects, project MRV will need to be kind of fine-tuned so that it can be financially viable while scientifically robust. And I think the only way to get there is through pilot projects, right? And understanding which measurements are needed, at what frequency we need to measure them. So while creative financing for monitoring is likely to be a big part of rolling out these pilot projects, I will note if the operational cost is reduced for a project, for a marine carbon dioxide removal project in particular, that can allow for more money to free up to focus on these kinds of monitoring reporting and verification questions. So I think that the data generated from these increased monitoring campaigns will benefit both fields and I think increased. Monitoring is likely to be a strong selling point of these types of integrations. 

Anu (49:56): And maybe to be a little bit more blunt, I would say to your question, are we confident that the costs will work out? The answer is no. We need to figure out the cost-benefit trade-off for all of these types of integrations. And that said, I think there are some interesting questions we can ask around the cost of landscape-level MRV, so some of these broader, lower-precision approaches, particularly if you don't need to do ton-for-ton crediting, if you're using some other policy mechanism to drive your activity. We've been looking at this at CRSI through the terrestrial enhanced weathering agricultural subsidies lines, and so we just put out a report on that. It's not fully transferable to the abiotic mCDR context, but I think there's some interesting threads to pull on there in terms of what is the cost-benefit trade-off of some of these questions around accuracy and precision and 10-for-10 crediting that we can really get into. 

Wil (50:52): I think that's an important point and getting beyond the really tight strictures of ton for ton, right? I think it's going to be, it's gonna be both salutary and probably critical for the industry moving forward. We'll see if we can get there, but I think some of the things you're talking about potentially give us the incentive structures to be able to do that, right, which is, was really important. So let's pivot to environmental justice considerations. An important part of your report focuses on environmental justice, which makes sense given both of your orientations. What are your key recommendations here in the context of the kind of projects that you're contemplating? 

Gabby (51:37): So the roadmap really synthesizes great existing resources in the carbon removal space. So I just wanna shout those out, both products that were produced from listening sessions by the National Wildlife Federation, as well as the how-to guide for engaging coastal communities on ocean alkalinity enhancement, which was produced by some of Wil's colleagues at the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. So definitely a plug to check those out. And really that's where the synthesis comes from. But I think in general, by aligning these projects with resilience priorities right off the bat, which are identified by the community and certainly diligence needs to be done to ensure that those are defined by the community are excellent starting points for these types of integrations. When thinking about the MCDR, the Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal specific points, the high level takeaways that are captured in the roadmap are really early engagement is key. Second, co-developing projects with communities to align tangible benefits is also necessary. I understand this is very hard to do and tricky with the current funding structure of, oftentimes you have to pitch a project to get funding in hand and then do the community engagement. So certainly big asterisks there that this is difficult to do on the ground. The third is using culturally relevant engagement techniques and the fourth is ensuring robust Indigenous community engagement recognizing their specific rights and free prior informed consent. 

Anna (53:18): Great. And I think we're definitely planning to have a longer episode also with such colleagues of Will in the near future to dive deeper into this topic, which obviously deserves its whole own episode, I'd say. I want to end on sort of understanding your general take on the next steps. So you, I think, conclude the roadmap with recommendations for various members such as state agencies, funders, but of course also CDR field representatives such as CDR companies, I suppose. Do you want to share with us a little bit what their willingness to engage on this project is so far and where you're planning to take this next? 

Gabby (54:08): So for this roadmap, we really did make the choice to focus on the public benefit angle. So for project developers, I really wanted multiple project developers to be able to see themselves in this roadmap and it's reflected so that perhaps they could see where they can kind of place themselves in this larger initiative, but really focused on the public benefit angle there. 

Anu (54:39): And very briefly, I just mentioned looking to do more outreach with companies going forward. But one thing that I've noticed, and maybe you all have noticed this too in the CDR field, is that more and more projects are integrated by necessity for permitting, finance, stakeholder engagement. This is just kind of happening in the ecosystem. And so one thing we're hopeful is that this will further catalyze these integrated opportunities and provide both parties, multiple parties, with some of the information that's going to enable that. But I think on a really basic level, like this is just happening because it's how you move forward with projects in the current environment. 

Gabby (55:15): Yeah, and together with CRSI, we are thinking about kind of the transferable learnings from these kinds of integrations for ocean alkalinity enhancement for the larger field. 

Anna (55:29): I think that's a wonderful note to end on. 

Wil (55:33): So thanks again, Gabby and Anu for joining us. And as always, thanks to our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment or review and please share this episode with colleagues. If you want to suggest a specific topic for a future episode, feel free to reach out to us through our LinkedIn group or via our email address, which is plansea@carbontosea.org. And with that, we say thank you and hear you next time. Bye all. 

Anna (56:03): Thank you, Gabby, thank you, Anu.

Gabby (56:04): Thank you both. 

Anu (56:05): Yeah, thanks for having us.