The City CDR Initiative released a new report, “Pathways to Carbon Sink Cities: Need-Gap Analysis“, in November 2025. This report is the second publication of a three-part series that explores the urban carbon dioxide removal (CDR) landscape and highlights opportunities to integrate DCR into urban systems, infrastructure, policies, and governance.
Download the report here.
Findings
The report draws on analysis from 20 participating cities, 25 partners, 18 developers, and extensive desktop research. It outlines methods and deployment pathways for scaling urban CDR and carbon-sink development, highlights why this is a key opportunity for impact funding, and identifies the governance gaps that currently limit progress.
Below are the key takeaways:
- Many CDR methods and urban deployment pathways have been demonstrated and are ready to scale.
- Impactful synergies can be achieved through adaptation, building decarbonization, improving air, land, and water quality, public health, restoration, and biodiversity, among other efforts.
- Today’s multi-level governance for net-zero climate action does not incentivize cities to tackle residual emissions, let alone achieve net-negative emissions.
- Cities lack access to high-quality guidance on how to include negative emissions in their greenhouse gas inventories.
- The city climate finance landscape isn’t designed to fund CDR projects in cities and doesn’t promote integrated climate action planning.
- Cities have the tools to support CDR, but municipal administrations are not organized to adopt a systemic approach to CDR.
- Governance innovation is necessary to support cross-administrative and multi-level strategies that harness climate action synergies.
A three-part series
The report series sets the stage. The first part, Pathways to Carbon Sink Cities: Vision Document, is a vision paper on how to incorporate carbon sinks into the urban environment during the climate crisis. The upcoming third part will focus on an implementation guide for carbon sinks.