Carbon Gap Open-Sources Country-Level CDR Readiness Toolkit

Seven countries, two years of assessments, and one question — "how much carbon could you actually remove?" — now sit in a free toolkit that Carbon Gap has released for anyone to replicate its national carbon removal readiness work.

The Brussels-based NGO opened the Carbon Removal Readiness Assessment (CRRA) toolkit this week as an open-access package hosted on a new CRRA website. The site also carries the full set of Carbon Gap's completed national assessments: Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, France, Norway and Finland.

The release converts a consultancy-style process into a self-service methodology. Governments, researchers and civil society organizations can now run a CRRA for their own country without Carbon Gap in the room.

Chief Scientist Sylvain Delerce put it plainly: "For two years we've been asking the same question, one country at a time: how much carbon could you actually remove? Now we're handing over the recipe. Any government, university, or NGO can pick up this toolkit and get a credible answer for their own country autonomously."

What is inside the toolkit?

The package is built to be operational rather than conceptual. It contains:

• A step-by-step guide covering methodology, timelines, budgets and staffing
• Templates for a background report and a national CDR roadmap
• Materials for stakeholder interviews and citizen panels
• A taxonomy of carbon dioxide removal methods
• A database of resource requirements, developed with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)
• An optimization tool for modeling how a country's resources could be allocated across different CDR methods

The optimization tool is the analytical core. It lets users test allocation scenarios across removal pathways instead of treating each method in isolation.

The interview and citizen-panel materials matter for the process as much as the output. Every assessment Carbon Gap ran in Europe relied on local partners, and the toolkit is designed so that national teams can reproduce that engagement without outside facilitation.

Why open-source the methodology now?

Seven assessments in two years is a deliberate sample, not a full map of Europe. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Norway and Finland cover a range of geographies, economies and policy postures toward carbon removal — but the list leaves most of the continent and the rest of the world unassessed.

Publishing the methodology is Carbon Gap's answer to scale. A small NGO cannot assess every country one at a time; a toolkit can travel where staff cannot. The wager is that national governments, universities and NGOs will pick up the work where the original seven assessments left off.

The timing also fits the calendar. Carbon Gap will present the toolkit to national delegations at the Think Negative Pavilion at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, which runs from 9 to 20 November 2026. That venue puts the methodology directly in front of the officials who could commission or run the next round of national assessments.

What happens next?

The test of an open methodology is uptake. The toolkit gives every country a credible path to quantify its realistic carbon dioxide removal potential — a number that most governments have never produced on a consistent basis.

The milestone to watch is COP31 in November 2026, where the first wave of delegations will decide whether the recipe travels.