Carbon Gap Releases Carbon Removal Assessment Toolkit
The free, open-access toolkit lets governments, researchers and civil society groups assess countries' carbon dioxide removal potential.
Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Energy
Carbon Gap has launched a free, open-access toolkit for carbon removal readiness assessments, hosted on the Carbon Removal Readiness Assessment (CRRA) website. The toolkit packages a methodology the organization has used in CRRA evaluations of seven countries over two years.
Why it matters
The toolkit makes a structured method for evaluating carbon dioxide removal available to governments and organizations beyond the group that developed it. Its release ahead of COP31 positions national carbon removal planning as a topic for international climate negotiations.
The CRRA evaluations cover seven countries assessed over two years, all in Europe, according to Carbon Gap's program record. The extraction does not specify the individual countries or report any comparative benchmarks for their carbon removal potential.
The players
Carbon Gap
Carbon Gap is an organization that conducts carbon removal readiness assessments for national governments and publishes related tools.
Rocky Mountain Institute
The Rocky Mountain Institute is a nonprofit energy research organization known for work on resource and decarbonization analysis, which contributed to the toolkit's resource requirements database.
The details
The toolkit includes a step-by-step guide covering methodology, timelines, budgets and staffing, along with templates for background reports and national carbon dioxide removal roadmaps. It also contains materials for stakeholder interviews and citizen panels, a taxonomy of carbon removal methods, and a resource requirements database developed with the Rocky Mountain Institute, plus an optimization tool that models how a country could allocate resources across methods.
Timeline
November 2, 2026: Carbon Gap launches the toolkit.
November 9 to 20, 2026: Carbon Gap presents the toolkit at the Think Negative Pavilion at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey.
Big Picture
Carbon dioxide removal has become a recurring item in UN climate negotiations at COP meetings, and Carbon Gap's toolkit gives national delegations a structured way to assess their own options. Its presentation at COP31 places country-level removal planning alongside the broader negotiating agenda.
Governments, researchers and civil society groups can use the free toolkit and its step-by-step guide to run their own carbon removal readiness assessments. The included templates for background reports and national roadmaps give a starting structure for planning, without requiring a separate budget for methodology development.
The takeaway
Countries that want to plan carbon dioxide removal can start with a structured readiness assessment rather than building one from scratch. The toolkit is free, so the cost barrier is limited to staff time and stakeholder engagement.
What happens next
Carbon Gap will present the toolkit at the Think Negative Pavilion at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, from November 9 to 20, 2026.
Further reading
For more on the technologies behind these assessments, see Energy coverage.
More information
The toolkit and all Carbon Gap CRRA assessments to date are hosted on the Carbon Removal Readiness Assessment website.
