Back on the TED stage, this time with 2,500 projects and a 50 foot woolly pig

Watch the TED Talk here

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On my bingo card for London Climate Action Week, I didn’t have “sharing a TED stage with a 50-foot-tall photo of a woolly pig”. But you have to expect the unexpected if you want to work on climate.

This all came about because TED Countdown asked me to update my 2021 TED Talk on carbon removals. It was a fascinating and unexpectedly heartening task – looking back at what I said in the very early days of this field, to see what still stands, and what has changed.

And five years on, the change is extraordinary. In 2021, carbon removals was still a tiny field, with only a handful of approaches being put into practice. Today at CUR8 we’re tracking more than 2,500 projects and companies around the world.

What’s more, removals are no longer some niche thing on the side. They are being woven into things we already need to do, multiplying the benefits along the way. There’s a natural relationship with regenerative agriculture: building carbon in soils can also build resilience, reduce the need for fertiliser and help farmers grow food in a way that works with nature rather than against it. 

Removals are also being integrated into industrial processes that already exist.Biochar is finding its way into concrete, enhanced rock weathering into wastewater treatment; mining waste can become a carbon sink. 

Policy is catching up too. Governments are bringing removals into their climate frameworks, while new net-zero standards are encouraging companies to incorporate them into their plans. At last this is starting to look less like a voluntary market led by pioneers, and more like an integral part of global climate action.

And most heartening of all, it’s real. In 2021, some of the projects I talked about existed only as artists’ renditions. This time I had photographs of the real thing. Right around the world, right now, removals projects are raising the incomes of smallholder farmers in India, providing jobs for Kenyan engineers, increasing the resilience of soils in Brazil, improving the efficiency of waste water treatment plants in Europe, turning mine tailings in America into carbon sinks – and pulling carbon from the air. 

None of this means the climate problem has got any easier. The science has become even clearer that removals are “unavoidable” – as the IPCC put it – and that we need billions of tonnes of them over the next few decades. It’s also clearer that even 1.5 degrees isn’t safe; we’re already experiencing the fires, floods, storms, droughts and heatwaves that I was talking about back then.

In 2021 I ended my talk saying that removals made me feel hope. Looking back, I realise that there was something naïve about that hope. I had no idea how hard it would be to create a whole suite of essential new climate solutions out of nothing. And yet now that it has survived contact with reality, the hope I feel in 2026 feels more real, more grounded and more likely to prevail. 

The challenge now is not to imagine this future, but to build it – much, much faster. Watch the talk, to see how far we’ve come and how many opportunities there are to go further.