Through the looking glass: transparency as key to market growth

The devil is in the details, as the saying goes – and if you’re even contemplating applying for EU funding, the detail is where you’re going to be until the end of time. In truth, I contemplated opening this article with the phrase "hidden in plain sight" to suggest that EU funding, while complex, is accessible to those who look – but that would be setting false and misleading expectations on an industrial scale.

Our mission and ambition, unfathomably large as it is - to enable the rapid and responsible scale-up of carbon dioxide removal - falters when researchers, start-ups and scale-ups can’t get access to the funding they need in an environment which today, is almost exclusively voluntary. It matters because despite the clear and obvious need for removals, it becomes almost impossible for organisations to find funding privately for research and proofs of concept, let alone scale, without the current regulatory measures to compel the efforts. 

A guide to getting lost in opaque EU funding pages

The most common complaint we hear from organisations and companies is that there simply isn’t funding available and yet, the response from EU institutions is most often: surprise. There are multiple programmes available with around hundreds of millions in potential funding, and yet the organisations that require funding to get us to the net zero mark often can’t find it. I’ve met many of them; entrepreneurs, as a rule, are tenacious and determined, and yet they stall and give up. So, I set about to see if I could do any better. Spoiler alert - I failed.

When I first learned that we, as Carbon Gap, were undertaking the mapping of EU carbon removal funding, I hate to admit that at first, I was highly sceptical as to whether we were just duplicating information that was already available. But when I tried to make the point and went myself to search for open funding opportunities, I too gave up after several hours of trying to make sense of it. I visited a page with the hilariously misleading title of “EU funding for beginners”. I read with eagerness the first section about Grant Funding, and with naïve anticipation scoured the page for the link to take me to see some funding opportunities. Alas, it was not to be. Eventually I found a link buried for a Funding & Tenders portal, but there isn’t a single word on the page that starts with “grant”, not one. From there, you’re expected to navigate the many spuriously named programmes and scroll through page after page to find what you need. The sceptic in me would think they don’t want you to apply. But they do.

To say funding opportunities are scattered and complex is like following a treasure map drawn by a drunk pirate. You may eventually find the buried treasure if you're lucky, but you'll spend months zigzagging across treacherous waters, feeling sea-sick along the way. The pirate analogy feels particularly relevant in this case as, unless you engage in the expensive process of using specialists to search and apply for you, or you have existing partners who have charted these waters previously, you’re most probably out of luck. It matters because it’s opaque and yet it’s easy to agree that transparency is the cornerstone of any healthy marketplace. 

Increasing transparency isn’t just for fun

Transparency is key to building trust across our ecosystem—it’s a principle that’s proven itself in science, government, and even in industries like banking and tech. In the iGaming industry where I spent most of my career, the move towards openness wasn’t taken lightly. Faced with growing scepticism and a pressing need for accountability, the industry turned to blockchain technology to make every transaction visible and verifiable. This move wasn’t just about sharing data—it was a deliberate effort to rebuild trust. They recognised that if everyone could see how transactions were handled, it would reinforce the idea that trust is earned through openness, making sure that no one ever loses sight of its importance.

But most of all, when it comes to innovation, transparency is like the secret sauce – boosting confidence, clearing up confusion, speeding up progress, and bringing everyone together for a proper exchange of ideas. When the details are out in the open, all those barriers start to crumble. 

Opening the door to better access to funding for carbon removal 

Open access to information builds trust and turns what might be a confusing maze into a well-trodden path, where you can quickly see what’s working and what needs to change. It creates an atmosphere in which ideas flourish and leads to creative breakthroughs that might never happen behind closed doors. In short, when transparency is prioritised, it’s not just about ticking boxes – it’s about making innovation a team activity where everyone gets a fair chance.

Whilst we can remark that hundreds of millions in funding is available for carbon removal, and given the difficulty of access, is likely to be still available, it’s a figurative drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the challenge. At Carbon Gap, this discrepancy is one of our key focus areas – pushing to ensure more avenues of funding become available, for programmes to be expanded to be inclusive, not exclusive, and to ensure that we can meet the demands of the scale of the challenge ahead of us to achieve net zero. But to use yet another tired idiom, it really is a case of the chicken and the egg. If the funding isn’t used because it can’t be found, or the acceptance rates are low, what motivation does the commission have for expanding the programmes? And similarly, if innovation can’t thrive, the demand will never be driven. And so here we land, in this impossible perpetual motion. 

Whilst we continue to advocate for and urge the commission to expand the funding available for carbon removal, and urgently demand easier, more transparent funding options, we find it impossible to sit idly by and watch something we care so deeply about fail. 

Clearing up the fog in EU funding

In that spirit, we launched a funding database on our Policy Tracker platform last month which presents all current and past EU funding related to carbon removal in Europe and the EU. This mammoth task is the result of months of mapping funding opportunities in the EU to inform our newest report on the current state of EU funding for carbon removal. 

In the last few weeks, we’ve shared the culmination of months of research, led by our amazing team at Carbon Gap, which allows you to search, filter and find relevant opportunities from across the continent in one easy-to-use screen. After all that effort, I’m definitely going to apply. We hope you do too.

Putting the work in so you don’t have to 

Our vision is that our EU Carbon Removal Funding Analysis report will provide the EU with a glance into the fog of their funding landscape. We hope that our Policy Tracker platform will transform how opportunities are found and acted on in the sector—making the whole process significantly easier and more intuitive. 

In fact, with a lean team of just a few people, we’ve built a platform that stands head and shoulders above those bloated with bureaucracy. It’s our way of showing that agility and focused expertise can truly make a difference. Making the data usable and accessible is one simple way we have found to move the needle on helping scale carbon removal in Europe.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.