Plain thesis: Carbon Gap's own research says the thing standing between buyers and a purchase is trust in the claim, not the ambition of the mission. This brief is credit-first: the Policy Tracker, the Funding Database, and the demand survey are all genuinely good, then names exactly where an independent, machine-checkable receipt (not another report) would answer the gap Carbon Gap's own words describe.
carbongap.org/insights/corporate-carbon-removal-market-survey) and its source PDF (carbongap.org/media/2026/corporate-survey.pdf, extracted via pdftotext), no "65%" figure and no explicit SBTi/ISO framing exists in either. The actual, verified figure (used throughout this brief) is 11 of 25 respondents (44%) naming quality/verifiability the single most important purchase factor, ahead of cost (7/25, 28%) and policy certainty (5/25, 20%). This is disclosed here rather than silently swapped, and flagged again in evidence.json.Fix the two dead links in your own nav → the policymaker who clicked your Advocacy Guide or CARE Calculator doesn't hit a dead page
Your homepage still links a Policy Advocacy Guide and a CARE Calculator that no longer resolve, so the exact researcher or policymaker your tools are built for reaches for one and finds nothing — a quick nav cleanup keeps the visitor who came looking for precisely that.
Your own survey already named the fix → a receipt buyers can check themselves unparks the demand they say they're holding
Your research found verifiability, not cost or policy, is the number-one reason corporate buyers hesitate on removals — so a proof-gated receipt anyone can independently re-check answers the very thing buyers told you is keeping their money on the sidelines.
Carbon Business Council, working with Bellwether Research, ran 25 in-depth interviews (Feb–Mar 2026) with senior sustainability leaders in the UK, Germany, France, and the US. Asked to name the single most important factor in a potential CDR purchase, three factors took 23 of 25 votes: Quality, 11/25 (44%) ("buyers want real, durable, measurable, independently verified removals"), ahead of Cost, 7/25 (28%) and Policy certainty, 5/25 (20%). The brief's own words: "Policy uncertainty makes waiting look safer than moving." Quality, the plurality factor, defined explicitly as independent verifiability, is precisely what an on-chain, proof-gated work receipt supplies.
Sources: carbongap.org/insights/corporate-carbon-removal-market-survey · carbongap.org/media/2026/corporate-survey.pdf (Alexander Mäkelä & Lydia Loopesko, methodology: Carbon Business Council + Bellwether Research)
tracker.carbongap.org tracks roughly 40 EU carbon-removal policies across 30+ European countries, including a dedicated CRCF explainer page and a live glossary. The Funding Database at tracker.carbongap.org/funding/database/ lists 700+ past and upcoming EU funding opportunities with a working ?filter_open=Yes query parameter, spanning a stated 2019–2045 window filterable by TRL and geography. Both load and respond as public pages; no signup wall encountered anywhere in this recon.
Sources: tracker.carbongap.org · tracker.carbongap.org/funding/database/ · tracker.carbongap.org/policy/crcf/
llms.txt, real robots.txt, honest 404s everywhere elsecarbongap.org/llms.txt is a real, distinct 1,446-byte file naming Carbon Gap's mission and every key page (What We Do, What Is CDR, Policy Tools, Insights, Team, Media, Careers, Funding). robots.txt is a real, well-formed 134-byte file with an explicit sitemap reference. Every other agent-shaped path checked (llms-full.txt, ai.txt, /.well-known/agent-card.json, /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, /.well-known/security.txt, /.well-known/x402) returns a TRUE 404 (byte-count and content matched against a nonsense-path control), not a soft-200 pretending those files exist. Several targets we've reviewed fail exactly this test; Carbon Gap passes it.
Sources: carbongap.org/llms.txt · carbongap.org/robots.txt · nonsense-path controls on both the root and /.well-known/
guide.carbongap.org and care.carbongap.org fail DNS resolutionThe homepage navigation links an "EU Policy Advocacy Guide" (guide.carbongap.org) and a "CARE Calculator" (care.carbongap.org), both still present in today's rendered nav. Neither subdomain resolves at all: DNS lookup fails outright (getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND / curl exit code 6, "Could not resolve host"), confirmed independently against two live sibling subdomains (tracker.carbongap.org and the apex carbongap.org, both resolve and return HTTP 200) to rule out a local network issue. This isn't a security problem; it reads as two retired or renamed subdomains whose nav links were never cleaned up.
Sources: carbongap.org homepage nav (rendered) · DNS lookups for guide.carbongap.org / care.carbongap.org vs. tracker.carbongap.org control
The European Commission adopted certification methodologies for carbon farming under the CRCF Regulation (EU 2024/3012) on 10 July 2026, covering mineral-soils/agroforestry, peatland/organic-soil rewetting, and afforestation. Cross-referenced against our own ecological-work-library defs: soil-carbon MRV patterns (VM0042-style) already have 144 matches and afforestation (VM0047-style) has 13, both structurally close to what the mineral-soils and afforestation CRCF methodologies require. Peatland rewetting has zero existing matches: a clean, dated, first-mover gap (water-table depth logging, drainage-ditch-blocking photo+GPS proof, peat-vegetation transect counts are all proof shapes our work-packet format already knows how to author, just not yet written for this category).
| CRCF activity | Our library today | Gap |
|---|---|---|
| Mineral soils / agroforestry | 144 matches | Low effort: add a CRCF cross-reference |
| Afforestation | 13 matches | Low effort: add a CRCF cross-reference |
| Peatland / organic-soil rewetting | 0 matches | First-mover: methodology is one week old |
Sources: tracker.carbongap.org/policy/crcf/ · European Commission news release, 10 Jul 2026 · internal: data/work-definitions/ecological-work-library-v1.json
Carbon Gap's own tracked timeline puts the first CRCF-certified units in buyers' hands in H1 2028, and separately, SBTi's Net-Zero Standard V2.0 (which Carbon Gap has itself published analysis on) introduces mandatory Ongoing Emissions Responsibility from 2035 for Category-A companies. Together, these turn "a retirement receipt anyone can independently re-check" from a nice-to-have into something closer to future compulsory bookkeeping. A work-packet-scale, proof-gated, on-chain receipt is early practice for a requirement that is now dated, not hypothetical.
Sources: carbongap.org/insights/sbti-corporate-net-zero-standard-blog · tracker.carbongap.org/policy/crcf/ (timeline)
Nothing here is a security problem or a broken product: Carbon Gap's tools are genuinely open, its site is honestly agent-discoverable (rarer than it sounds), and its own research names the real barrier precisely: buyers want quality they can verify themselves, not another party's word for it. The gap is narrow: a receipt format that supplies that independent verifiability at work-packet scale, cross-referenced to the CRCF categories Carbon Gap's own tracker already defines, starting with the peatland category that's one week old and has no competition yet.
