This year, two standards will be released to help govern corporate climate action. Both must address an issue that has become more divisive than the science warrants: what kinds of carbon removal should count towards corporations offsetting their carbon emissions. The first is the International Organization for Standardization’s first net-zero standard (ISO 14060), and the second is the final version of the Science Based Targets Initiative’s corporate rules on net zero.

Carbon credits are failing to help with climate change — here’s why

This debate has spurred on a contest between ‘nature based’ approaches , such as storing carbon in soils and planting forests, and engineered technologies, which capture carbon dioxide directly from the air and store it safely and permanently, for example underground.

This contest is intuitively appealing, but it is scientifically misleading and increasingly counterproductive. In my role advising companies on carbon removal, I have seen it muddy decisions at every level.…