Carbon180's Making Waves named to Fast Company's World Changing Ideas. by Jason Aul Jun 17, 2026 This week, Carbon180's Making Waves Coastal Community Regranting Initiative made Fast Company's World Changing Ideas list. The list honors projects and organizations working to make the world safer, cleaner, more sustainable, and more fair. Carbon180 is proud to be included on this list. The win comes at a time when policy, research, and private-sector interest in marine carbon removal (mCDR) is expanding, but important questions about governance, community agency, and ecosystem impacts remain unresolved. There's a lot Carbon 180 still don't know about how mCDR affects ocean ecosystems and the communities tied to them. When you're testing new approaches in waters people fish and live by, that uncertainty is a responsibility, not a footnote. Scale it wrong and you can't undo it. What Making Waves actually does Carbon 180 started Making Waves last year to put coastal communities in charge of how early mCDR exploration happens near them. And Carbon 180 wanted to ensure that communities were part of the process right at the beginning. Not as an afterthought, but right from the get-go. Making Waves supports regionally diverse teams with funding, technical support, and the room to decide for themselves what mCDR should look like in their own waters, if anything. Carbon 180 named its first cohort in October 2025: three community-based organizations, each receiving $100,00 a year for two years: * The CLaM project in Alaska is bringing fishers, Indigenous groups, and marine scientists to the same table. They're running roundtables in Kodiak and Prince William Sound, two regions that already know what environmental damage costs, to build policy recommendations for how mCDR should be governed. * ʻĀina Momona in Hawai[[ʻ]]i is surveying fishers, cultural practitioners, and young people across the state to find out what people actually know and think about mCDR. You can't ground a project in community input if you've never measured where the community stands. * ISER Caribe in Puerto Rico is folding mCDR into conservation work they're already doing, training community members to run a mangrove nursery and restore coastline. Since then, Carbon 180 has worked closely with each of its grantees to share knowledge, conduct site visits, and begin building new frameworks for approaching and evaluating mCDR. Building mCDR to last Since its infancy, the mCDR conversation belonged to academics and private developers. The people who know these waters best, and who'll feel the effects first, were mostly left out of it. That's not the way it should be, and Carbon 180 intended to fix it. Scaling mCDR requires Carbon 180 to cultivate long-term public trust. Projects become more durable when the people around them helped shape them. When Indigenous knowledge, fishers' experience, cultural practice, and residents' priorities are built into the design instead of consulted at the end, Carbon 180 know mCDR development will be done the right way. With Making Waves Carbon 180 is working with communities to set the baseline. What does equitable, locally grounded mCDR look like? What does carbon removal more broadly owe the places it lands in? Communities are answering those questions, and Carbon 180 is following their lead. The bigger picture Carbon 180 need carbon removal at gigaton scale to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. mCDR can help get Carbon 180 there, and when done right it can do more than pull legacy carbon out of the atmosphere. It can bring jobs and opportunity to coastal communities and make life there better. But only if those communities are the architects of it, not the recipients of whatever gets handed down. That's its mission with Making Waves, and Carbon 180 is honored to be recognized by Fast Company and excited for the work ahead.

Carbon180, the Carbon Business Council & Ocean Conservancy launch new mCDR forum. February 10, 2026 Carbon180, the Carbon Business Council, and Ocean Conservancy have launched a new marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) forum, providing a platform where stakeholders can engage in talks around this emerging decarbonization field. As shared by the creators, the forum is intended to serve as a space where academia, mCDR suppliers and buyers, environmental and climate NGOs, philanthropists, coastal and Indigenous communities, and local, state, federal, international, and tribal governments can come together to exchange perspectives in shared conversations on the many aspects of ocean-based CO2 removal approaches. Oceans play a vital role in the natural carbon cycle, absorbing vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. mCDR refers to novel technologies focused on enhancing the carbon absorption in ocean waters through an array of innovative systems and approaches. Recognizing that oceans could play a key role in climate change mitigation, companies, scientists, and other field stakeholders have embarked on mCDR projects in this sector, creating a rapidly evolving decarbonization field that currently has ongoing early-stage research, in-water field trials, and even early deployment in some cases. In parallel with this dynamic development, mCDR technologies also raise numerous questions around governance, environmental integrity, accountability, equity, and public trust, and the answers provided on them will meaningfully define this sector in the future. The new mCDR forum is created to facilitate cross-sector discussions, where participants can engage in dialogues, knowledge and resource sharing, and community-building, helping this field advance with shared understanding and open communication. This platform is being launched at a time of growing interest in mCDR, where governments are allocating research funding, companies are developing and testing different mCDR systems, and scientists are deep in research on the benefits, risks, and monitoring needs of these technologies. The forum is explicitly mCDR approach-agnostic, and its idea and purpose are not to promote specific pathways or to advocate for deployment, but rather to serve as a space for informed discussion based in evidence, transparency, and accountability. Additionally, the creators point out that participants are not asked to endorse position papers, sign letters, or converge on shared recommendations, and instead, they are welcomed to engage with peers in respectful conversations and mCDR dialogues. The forum now offers a proactive space for transparent mCDR conversations, and interested parties are invited to register for it here.