Background

In recent years, enhanced rock weathering (ERW) has quickly moved from a niche research topic to a widely discussed pathway for durable carbon dioxide removal. Academic interest has surged, peer-reviewed publications have multiplied, and philanthropic and commercial actors have supported research and early deployments. ERW has also drawn attention from large innovation prize programs such as the XPrize Carbon Removal competition, and is being considered in policy frameworks, including the IPCC National GHG Inventories, the European Union's certification frameworks for carbon removal, and climate-smart agricultural programs in the U.S. and Brazil.

This attention is well-deserved: ERW holds the potential to remove atmospheric CO₂ while delivering tangible soil health and crop nutrient benefits. Some of the early ERW momentum is emerging in tropical agricultural regions in the Global South, especially where soil nutrient depletion is chronic and climate stress is growing — making the link between carbon removal, productivity, and farmer livelihood especially compelling. As Cascade's Weathering Potential Explorer highlights, weathering rates and agricultural benefits align in many of these regions.

But alongside this promise, some questions remain that limit ERW's growth:

• How quickly and reliably does carbon removal occur?
• What are the best and most cost-effective ways to measure carbon removal in ERW in real-world agricultural systems?
• How do carbon removal and agronomic outcomes of ERW vary across soils, climates, and rock types?

These uncertainties are not a sign that ERW lacks potential — they reflect a field that is still maturing. But for ERW to move toward climate-relevant scale deployments, building a strong and trusted evidence base is essential.

The Requirements for Reaching Climate-Relevant Scale

Most of the early activity in ERW is linked to the voluntary carbon market (VCM). The VCM has played an important catalytic role, supporting early field deployments and funding the needed investment in the development of measurement, monitoring and verification approaches.

But the voluntary market alone will not determine whether ERW becomes a large-scale climate solution. In the long term, ERW will need additional support from several complementary pathways, including:

• Compliance carbon markets, where removals could be recognized under a range of national and international crediting frameworks, each with distinct quantification and durability requirements.
• Pay-for-practice agricultural programs, where farmers are rewarded for adopting practices that provide proven climate and soil benefits at a landscape scale.
• Farmer-driven adoption, where ERW becomes attractive to farmers based on agronomic performance and economic returns.

Each of these demand pathways requires different types of evidence.

Compliance markets tend to set a higher evidentiary bar than the VCM — but not a uniform one. Article 6 bilateral agreements, regional cap-and-trade systems, and national crediting mechanisms each apply different standards for quantification, additionality, and durability, but share a common orientation toward jurisdictional credibility and tonne-for-tonne integrity.

Pay-for-practice programs require the ability to estimate climate benefits reliably and at a low cost, in ways that can integrate into national greenhouse gas inventories and the IPCC accounting frameworks used to track countries' climate commitments. They also typically require evidence of agronomic benefits — soil health, crop yield, input efficiency — that justify adoption as a farming practice, not just a carbon intervention.

And critically, since ERW is a farming practice, farmers will ultimately determine whether it spreads across landscapes. This means that agronomic performance — and the individual farmer's benefit-risk calculus and practical experience of ERW — will matter just as much as carbon accounting.

To reach climate-relevant scale, ERW must demonstrate viability for all three of these pathways.

The Questions Commercial Actors Can't Answer

Commercial deployment plays an important role in advancing the evidence base for ERW. These deployments generate valuable real-world data, and the companies leading these efforts have meaningfully advanced measurement, monitoring and verification approaches. Data sharing efforts such as our ERW Data Quarry initiative aims to ensure that insights from commercial deployments contribute to the broader scientific understanding of ERW.

However, commercial deployments are shaped by the opportunities in front of them — today, that means the voluntary carbon market. As such, research embedded within commercial deployments is often designed to support near-term carbon credit validation, rather than a broader set of questions needed to unlock long-term policy and adoption pathways. Many of the most important scientific questions require a different type of research effort, including:

• Measurements beyond those that are easily measured, including deeper soil profiles and downstream river systems
• Higher measurement density, including more frequent and more costly sampling
• Agronomic outcomes, including crop productivity and soil health
• Dedicated long-term monitoring, often spanning many years

These types of studies are difficult for commercial actors to prioritize and sustain. Commercial deployments face limited timelines, cost pressure, and evolving business priorities that make long-term, focused research efforts challenging. Early commercial projects also concentrate on large scale farm operations, where rock deployments and monitoring are more tractable — leaving important questions about ERW's impact on smallholder systems less explored.

In addition, there are structural constraints associated with commercially-led research. Commercial projects are often designed to demonstrate success, and results that are null, negative, or inconclusive may be less likely to be surfaced or shared. Independent research complements commercial deployments, helping ensure that a fuller range of outcomes are observed and compared.

Recently, several high-profile carbon removal startups in other fields have shut down or scaled back operations, underscoring the need for multi-year scientific research programs that outlive the uncertain trajectories of early companies. To complement commercial deployment-driven learning, the field needs independent research infrastructure that can persist beyond individual companies and answer questions private entities are least able to address.

If ERW is to develop a robust and trusted scientific foundation, independent research efforts will be essential — particularly for the questions that commercial deployments are least able to address.

The Need for Coordinated Research

Academic researchers around the world are already tackling many important questions for ERW. But the current research landscape remains fragmented. Individual studies may use different experimental designs and measurement strategies, making results difficult to compare or synthesize.

At the same time, much of the existing academic research has been concentrated in regions where funding is most readily available — primarily in North America and Europe. Yet much of ERW's potential lies elsewhere, particularly in tropical agricultural regions across the Global South.

Advancing the scientific foundations of ERW will require research that is coordinated across sites, comparable in experimental design, focused on under-represented geographies, and able to measure both carbon and agronomic outcomes on the same fields.

When research is coordinated, the insights from many studies can add up to far greater than the sum of their parts. This is why researchers across carbon removal fields are beginning to develop infrastructure that builds scientific confidence. For example, the Carbon to Sea Initiative is supporting coordinated, multi-site, long-term monitoring programs for ocean alkalinity enhancement, recognizing that such efforts are essential for building scientific confidence.

Introducing the Bedrock Initiative

Since our founding, Cascade Climate has helped lead the work to validate ERW for scale. We see the Bedrock Initiative as a continuation of that commitment to ERW's future.

Bedrock Initiative will critically strengthen the evidence base for ERW — generating research more transparent than commercial projects, more coordinated than individual studies, and built to complement both. Bedrock focuses on the questions that individual actors are structurally least able to tackle — longer time horizons, broader geographic coverage, and rigorous assessment of agronomic outcomes. Specifically, the Bedrock Initiative will tackle three problems inhibiting deployment and demand:

Closing the carbon-removal uncertainty gap

Bedrock's Coordinated Research Network (CRN) will apply standardized research protocols across intensively measured field sites — generating the apples-to-apples evidence the field has lacked. Sustained over multi-year timescales, measurements will go deeper into the soil profile and use multiple methods to robustly constrain ERW's carbon removal under varied conditions.

Building the agronomic evidence farmers and policymakers need

Studies at Scale will address questions that can only be answered on working farms — including soil organic carbon dynamics, watershed-level monitoring, and yield benefits across cropping systems. With particular focus on the Global South, where ERW's promise for acidic soils is greatest, rigorous trials will build the crop-benefit data needed to earn farmer trust.

Driving down monitoring costs that block scale

The Model Acceleration effort will convene leading academic geochemical modelers to identify key field data gaps and develop validated, model-based monitoring — much as reliable weather models have replaced costly ground stations.

For ERW to reach climate-relevant scale, ERW will require a durable scientific foundation that policymakers, farmers, researchers, and the public can trust. Help us build that future with the Bedrock Initiative:

• If you are conducting academic research on ERW, we welcome your participation in the work ahead. To learn how you can get involved, email us.
• If you are an ERW buyer or project developer interested in embedding research into your work, please reach out here.
• If you are developing policy frameworks where ERW could play a role, we'd like to learn more about your needs. Email our Policy team at [email protected].

To learn more about Bedrock Initiative, please visit cascadeclimate.org/bedrock-initiative — and to follow the journey, sign up for newsletter updates here.