Ask five people in the carbon market whether buyers should prioritise nature or technology, and you’ll get five strong opinions, but rarely a clear answer to what the right mix actually looks like in practice. 

The two pieces below approach the question from different starting points. One argues that nature’s scale, speed, and co-benefits make it indispensable for near-term targets. The other argues that compliance-driven demand will soon outstrip what any single pathway can deliver, and that engineered removals need investment now. They reach compatible conclusions – but the routes they take, and the open questions they surface, are worth reading separately. 

The case for engineered carbon removal, alongside nature

Compliance frameworks will drive demand for carbon removal far beyond what any single pathway can supply. The time to invest across the full range, nature and engineered, is now.

Kate Rodger, Head of Business Development, North America, Isometric

There is a version of the carbon removal debate that frames nature-based and engineered approaches as rivals. It is the wrong debate, and a distraction the market can do without.

We need to remove up to 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and then more still to reverse the damage done. No single pathway can close that gap.

Nature-based carbon removal is doing real work. Reforestation, soil carbon, mangrove restoration: these pathways are efficient, deployable now, at meaningful scale, with co-benefits that extend well beyond the carbon itself: supporting biodiversity, improving soil health, and providing direct value to communities. But the carbon stored in ecosystems doesn’t last for thousands of years, and it’s vulnerable in ways that geological storage is not.

Engineered pathways like Mineralization, Enhanced Weathering, and Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement store carbon in forms that persist for thousands of years, with minimal risk of being reversed or re-released into the atmosphere. This matters for buyers seeking a like-for-like offset: a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted today will remain in the atmosphere for millennia. Only removals that match that durability can cancel it out long-term.

These technologies also provide important co-benefits: Enhanced Weathering can improve agricultural soil quality and support smallholder farmers; biomass approaches create value from waste that would otherwise release carbon back into the atmosphere.

A portfolio that combines both manages risk better than one concentrated in either direction, and research suggests a blended approach can prove more cost-effective than relying on any single pathway.

The more important argument is structural. Demand for carbon removal will grow substantially as compliance frameworks come into force and more organizations are required to purchase carbon removal to offset their residual emissions. To meet this demand, carbon removal needs to scale now across all viable pathways. This requires buyer investment now, including in engineered pathways that are still maturing and remain relatively expensive. 

Carbon removal doesn’t benefit from a hierarchy of pathways. It benefits from high-quality credits, rigorous science, and support for the full range of projects needed to reverse climate change. Nature-based and engineered approaches aren’t in competition. They’re both necessary. The question for buyers, suppliers, and policymakers isn’t which pathway wins. It’s how quickly we can build the capacity the world will need, because the window to do so is narrowing.

Nature’s place in the portfolio

For near-term climate targets, nature offers scale, speed, and cost that no other approach can match. The harder question is how to invest well within it.

Sarah Walker, Director of REDD+ and NCS at Wildlife Conservation Society

The case for nature in a carbon portfolio rests on the scale, speed, and what the next decade actually requires.

We need to remove and avoid billions of tonnes of carbon emissions between now and 2035 to keep 1.5°C within reach. Engineered removals, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, bioenergy with carbon capture, are essential for the long term. But today, they are capital intensive and years from commercial scale, making large-volume purchases financially out of reach for most buyers. Nature-based solutions, delivering both avoided emissions and active carbon removal, are already operating at the gigatonne scale in the landscapes where emissions pressure is most acute, at costs that make meaningful corporate and policy commitments viable right now. That is not a small distinction.

No engineered facility provides the multi-tiered return on investment that nature-based solutions provide. Nature-based solutions protect the watershed that a downstream community depends on, or maintains the forest corridor that allows species to migrate as the climate shifts, or keeps carbon stored in a peatland that took centuries to form. These are not secondary benefits. For the communities living alongside these ecosystems, they are often the primary ones. A portfolio that excludes nature doesn’t just miss carbon—it misses the co-benefits that make climate finance durable and defensible.

The approaches to demonstrate durable impact have continued to evolve. Jurisdictional approaches, buffer pools, improved monitoring, and evolving liability structures mean that reversal risk in high-integrity nature-based credits is quantified, governed, and managed. The label “temporary” understates how far durability governance has come.

A serious portfolio uses the best available tools for each timescale and objective. For near and mid term targets, avoided emissions provide the ‘avoided loss’ that keeps our world within the 1.5°C window today, while removals build the carbon sinks of tomorrow. By prioritizing high-quality international nature credits now, investors move capital to where it is most effective—often in the Global South, where existing carbon stocks face irreversible loss.In the race to mitigate climate change, nature remains the indispensable speed required.  The question now is how to choose well within it.