Turkiye’s CDR Pioneers: Scaling Up Biochar and Regenerative Agriculture for High-Integrity Carbon Removal

Durable carbon removal is to the date, works as a Global-North, voluntary-market story, held to a higher bar than renewables or waste management. Yet the host country Türkiye already has removal projects operating now, but they lack the policy demand, procurement and market signals to scale. This session presents two live Turkish cases, on a shared certification pathway, as candidate Actions to Accelerate CDR — serving the Türkiye Presidency track: durable removal as a practical tool for waste valorisation and industrial competitiveness, not a distant mid-century concern.

SASKİ (Samsun Metropolitan Municipality) with technology partner BKC Makina: Türkiye's first — and one of the world's first — facilities converting ~70 tonnes/day of municipal wastewater sludge into durable biochar via pyrolysis, which started to operation in September 2026. With this project organic wastes are converted to high quality biochar for landfill for permanent storage or concrete and construction materials for durable removal in addition to directly to Türkiye's cement/concrete sector and its CBAM exposure.

Tekirdağ Önder Çiftçi: Türkiye's largest no-till / regenerative carbon-farming programme, with measured soil organic carbon, rural jobs and soil-health co-benefits, the just-transition, "no false choice between climate and development" narrative in practice.

Both projects are being taken through methodology, MRV and certification-readiness by Life Climate under recognised durable-removal standards such as Verra, Isometric or Puro-Earth. In this workshop we will present two first-of-its-kind projects case studies: high-integrity soil carbon and biochar CDR routes and lets both implementers share real operational data, MRV approach, costs, and the specific barriers to scale in developing countries such as Turkiye.

For a cement- and concrete-exposed economy facing the EU border adjustment, durable removals are not only a climate tool but a competitiveness one. Carbon-negative biochar used as a construction-material additive lowers the embedded emissions of the product itself — the quantity CBAM prices — while the session also opens the forward-looking policy question of how durable removals should be recognised under the EU CBAM/ETS and Türkiye's emerging ETS. This reframes CDR for Turkish industry from a compliance cost into a route to protect export margins and industrial survival.

Audience takeaways:

(1) recognise durable removals in Türkiye's NDC revision and in COP31 zero-waste / industrial-decarbonisation programming;

(2) create early demand through public and municipal procurement, and clarify the role of removals under CBAM and Türkiye's ETS;

(3) a replicable, certification-backed "waste-to-removal" and "farmland-to-removal" template other emerging economies can adopt. Every claim respects the mitigation hierarchy and durability red lines — removal as a complement to deep emission cuts, never a substitute.