Stripe Launches Platform Enabling Businesses to Pre-order Carbon Removal
Financial infrastructure platform provider Stripe announced the launch of Climate Orders, a new platform aimed at enabling businesses to integrate carbon removal into their sustainability programs through the pre-ordering of carbon removal tons through advance market commitment coalition Frontier.
According to the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study released last year, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades. The report also noted, however, that while there are multiple existing solutions to capture and store CO2, most are early stage and currently limited in scale.
Launched in April 2022 with commitments by tech companies Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify and Meta and global management consulting firm McKinsey, Frontier is an advance market commitment to buy permanent carbon removal, aimed at accelerating the development of carbon removal technologies with guarantees of future demand. The coalition announced four new members earlier this year, including Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Workday, bringing the group’s total commitments to over $1 billion. In addition to setting a demand pool for carbon removal, Frontier also vets suppliers, with a focus on solutions with the potential to achieve high volume and low cost.
Under the new offering, businesses will be able to pre-order a specific number of carbon removal tons from Frontier’s portfolio of growth-stage carbon removal companies, with a certificate provided upon delivery.
According to Stripe, the new offering is intended for businesses looking to buy a specific number of carbon removal tons to meet a climate target, or to allow their own customers to purchase removals from the Frontier portfolio. The new system is already being used by businesses including enterprise climate platform Watershed, carbon market infrastructure platform Patch, and non-profit carbon removal-focused organization Terraset.
Lauren Polansky, Climate Product Manager at Stripe, said:
“Climate Orders takes Frontier’s core expertise of finding, vetting, and contracting with the most promising carbon removal companies and makes it available to a much broader set of businesses. We hope this unlocks even more of the demand needed to get carbon removal to climate-relevant scale.”