1. Our Governance Approach

Defining Governance

Governance refers to the rules, decision-making processes, and practices for managing collective matters. It also includes the mechanisms to hold individuals and organizations accountable for their decisions.

Examples include corporate governance – i.e., the rules, regulations, and practices by which a company is managed and operated – and international governance, such as the United Nations’ role as a global convener to bring public and private actors together to address global threats. Within the context of carbon removal, governance concerns the rules, protocols, and decision-making and oversight processes by which interventions designed to positively impact the climate are transparently researched, introduced, and scaled.

At Running Tide, we think about governance in terms of the processes we implement, the actions we take, and the oversight mechanisms we develop – internally and as an industry – to ensure that our work has its intended net positive effect. This includes building and maintaining our social license to operate, developing close working relationships and open lines of communication with scientific leaders, policymakers, and the communities in which we work, and engaging with a range of stakeholders to appropriately weigh any potential risks associated with our activities against the baseline risk of inaction.

Our Responsibility

The need for carbon removal at a massive scale to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis is well documented, consensus science.

The ocean is a global commons and the center of our climate system. Our responsibility is to the ocean, the communities we work with, the people doing the work, and our government, academic, and corporate partners who enable this work to be done. We see our Governance Principles as a means by which to create accountability for that responsibility as we follow a staged progression towards scale.

While this framework details the principles we follow to ensure we act responsibly in achieving our intended positive impact, it is also reflective of our belief that we have a responsibility to act. Our work, and the principles we commit to adhere to, are contextualized against the known risks of inaction and the rapidly declining baseline state of the ocean. Managing these dual responsibilities is a balance; we take the minimal incremental risk per step as we progress our work, but also take those steps as quickly as possible, at the fastest pace that our analysis, iteration, and learning loops can match.

We understand that as a leader in the rapidly growing field of carbon removal, the principles we set are likely to be scrutinized, refined, and adopted by others who follow and build upon our work, helping to set the bar for other practitioners. We hope this is a framework others will follow – both because we believe operationalizing these principles is required to do this work effectively, and because it creates a shared platform against which the success of this work can be evaluated and measured. With the end goal of mitigating climate change, the success of one is the success of all.