Forging a path to gigatonne scale carbon removals requires significant and diverse policy interventions, globally, on every level of government – from the very local to the supranational.
Bright sparks are novel, high-impact policy approaches to removing barriers and creating opportunities for the carbon removals sector. They are important for the changes they bring to the places where they are enacted, as well as the parallel spillover influence they can have on policy considerations in other places.
This platform exists to facilitate greater access to and understanding of current bright sparks, and to inspire and support the prolific generation and rapid spread of yet more bright sparks, worldwide.
Here’s how:
Building awareness and understanding
Even at this early stage an impressive number of high-impact carbon removal policies and proposals have emerged from points across the globe, and at different levels of government.
Bright Sparks provides tools that enable a diverse range of stakeholders – from public sector servants, to civil society policy experts, and grassroots citizen advocates – to identify, assess and compare different policy approaches, with the aim of inspiring real world action.
The Bright Sparks Map, policy profiles, and our regularly published Insights are designed not just to inform, but to empower new policy thinking and activism.
Catalysing new policy generation
Our mission is not simply to document and interpret model policy, but to create conditions that directly support the rapid and prolific generation of new bright sparks, all over the world.
To this end, we empower local advocacy coalitions to research and develop novel policy proposals that align with the impact potential and real world constraints that prevail in their specific action contexts. This involves direct step-by-step guidance based on established policymaking best practices. We actively create lines of communication between parallel advocacy efforts to facilitate the transfer of knowledge, ideas and experience.
And to ensure maximum quality, ensuring that policy proposals incorporate the latest science and reflect practical private sector needs, knowledge and perspectives, we connect local advocacy teams with carbon removal experts and ‘doers’ who are part of Rethinking Removal’s global network.
Mobilizing advocacy campaigns
Once new bright sparks have been developed and fully vetted, we support advocacy teams in the design and implementation of coalition-based campaigns to enact their proposals in the real world.
This includes exposure to successful strategies and tactics that align with the available resources and political conditions that teams command and confront, and the recruitment of knowledge and material support from the broader Rethinking Removals community.
