Conference Agenda

Successive landmark IPCC assessments have projected that for ambitious climate targets to be reached, vast amounts of carbon sinks must balance emissions sources – speculative approaches and scales that may never exist as envisioned. These anticipatory assessments (future options and pathways that inform present-day planning) were largely driven by integrated assessment modelling within IPCC’s Working Group III, and have had two wider effects. Firstly, they have entrenched ‘carbon removal’ as a climate strategy, signalling for development of and policy for land, marine, and technology-based approaches. Second, they have spurred reflection on how techno-economic systems modelling could have so swiftly redefined climate action, and how assessment could better map the uncertainties and challenges surrounding carbon removal. This session merges policy-driven and critical perspectives on the anticipatory assessment of carbon removal’s feasibility, across socio-political, environmental, and techno-economic dimensions. We aim to bridge these dimensions: (1) by asking how assessments are created through contrasting practices, kinds of expertise, and communities across different polities (institutions, countries, regions) or scales (local to global); (2) by asking what ‘performative’ (implicitly steering) effects do current assessment practices have on carbon removal, and (3) by asking how assessments can be improved by integrate diverse perspectives, kinds of knowledge, and new engagement methods to better map challenges and concerns.

The role of the IPCC is to produce assessments of the state of the scientific literature on climate change, its impacts and solutions. It is expected to highlight where there is agreement and disagreement in the literature assessed by its three Working Groups (WGs) and to integrate their main conclusions into a Synthesis Report (SYR). The assessment of CDR was a particular hot topic in AR6, as many scientists and governments see removal activities as mitigation strategies—akin to reducing carbon dioxide emissions—while other remain sceptical of their maturity and efficacy. The IPCC WGs, as aggregates of different epistemologies, geographies and cultures, took different approaches to CDR. WGIII for instance highlighted that it was "unavoidable if net zero emissions are to be achieved", while WGII sought to emphasise the risks associated with these activities. In this paper, we explore (1) how CDR was assessed across the three WGs and the SYR; (2) how CDR was framed and negotiated in the approval of Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs); and (3) how the IPCC communicated on CDR at SB57 and COP27. Methodologically, this paper is based on ethnographic methods—direction observation of IPCC/UNFCCC meetings (2019-2023), interviews and document analysis (drafts, review comments, etc.). Conceptually, it builds on social studies of science to explore the negotiated dimension of assessment making. We aim at shedding light on how an all-encompassing institution like the IPCC settles (dis)agreement about policy sensitive issues and creates constructive ambiguities to maintain a certain coherence and a unified front.

Since net zero greenhouse gas emissions targets have become a keystone of climate policy, there has been increasing debate about the need to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in addition to dramatically reducing emissions. The ocean plays a key role in regulating the global climate by absorbing a large proportion of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. As the technical and political challenges of land-based carbon dioxide removal approaches become more apparent, the oceans may become the new “blue” frontier for carbon drawdown strategies. This talk highlights ways in which scenario development work on marine carbon-dioxide removal (mCDR) could learn from the way (modelled) land-based CDR (predominantly bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BECCS) scenarios were focused on cost-optimization. The prioritization of economic criteria in assessing the potential of CDR resulted in the neglect of other factors which have since emerged as significantly reducing the overall ‘feasibility’ of BECCS – including projected effects on biodiversity, the potential for water and land-use conflicts, as well as political and societal barriers to implementation. This talk argues that more diverse (qualitative) scenarios should be developed to holistically assess mCDR. Reporting on an mCDR foresight process which involved German public officials, scientists and stakeholders, this talk outlines how qualitative, participatory scenario development can; 1) facilitate structured, future-oriented inter- or transdisciplinary communication and learning about the future (in)feasibility of mCDR; 2) widen understandings of plausible/feasible mCDR developments based on the interactions between a broad range of political, economic, technological, and social risks and benefits and; 3) increase critical reflection to examine and challenge the assumptions embedded in mCDR assessment. The talk concludes by exploring how qualitative foresight could complement quantitative scenarios in anticipating the range of diverse socio-ecological dimensions (and their interactions) that will play a role in mCDR futures.

Net zero emissions deadlines are rapidly approaching, and evidence is building that reductions alone will be insufficient to meet these. As such, interest in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is growing. Marine or ocean-based approaches are emerging as an important category of CDR, given their (theoretical) potential for large-scale carbon dioxide sequestration and storage. While some approaches have undergone small-scale experimentation, others remain at the concept stage. Beyond techno-economic or environmental questions, marine CDR (mCDR) raises challenges for governance, the study of which is only just beginning (National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, 2021). Rather than understand these questions as ancillary to techno-economic feasibility, scholarship on anticipatory governance and ‘responsible research and innovation’ (RRI) has highlighted consideration of societal values, needs, and expectations as essential to research and design processes themselves (e.g., Macnaghten, 2016). While scholarship on RRI offers a set of general principles, insights remain high level, and difficult to translate to the diverse and speculative proposals on mCDR.

Investigating experts’ imaginaries of mCDR offers one useful inroad to generating specific recommendations on these governance challenges, as they can serve to help interpret how implicit or unstated values and assumptions shape the production of relevant science and particular mCDR technologies. This paper offers insight into such emerging expert imaginaries of mCDR, with a particular focus on its governance challenges. We draw upon interviews with a broad range of mCDR experts to highlight key tensions in the socio-technical assessment of mCDR. Four themes emerge from this research and demand more explicit public debate: (1) ongoing assumptions that certain mCDR approaches are more ‘natural’ and thus preferable to others; (2) the need for new paradigms of evidence building in light of a growing sense of urgency vis-a-vis climate stabilization targets; (3) the relevance of understanding the material consequences of different technical configurations of mCDR; and (4) the necessity of clarifying ambiguous delineations of publics relevant to mCDR projects. We offer several policy recommendations towards designing more ‘responsible’ project-level assessment of mCDR.

The challenges of tomorrow’s climatic impacts, sociopolitical conditions, and still-immature response strategies real today are well established. Diverse methods – foresight and scenario construction, prototyping and fiction-writing, games and roleplaying, and even kinds of modeling – anticipate plausible and persuasive futures, make them experiential, and foster greater inclusivity and reflection in public debate and decision-making on climate change.

This paper highlights one particular “headlines” method and exercise, developed as part of a mixed-methods public engagement process spanning (i) 22 countries worldwide (ii) in rural and urban settings, regarding (iii) eight kinds of climate interventions approaches (three solar geoengineering and five carbon removal) that are emerging in scientific, innovation, and policy agendas. The method draws inspiration from scenario construction and prototyping, calling for over 300 participants (~8 people per focus group, 1 rural and 1 urban group per 22 countries) to construct a headline each about a chosen climate intervention in 2030. Each is an abbreviated scenario, containing three elements: a technology considered especially hopeful or concerning, an event in 2030 that must be either positive or negative, and an actor (civic, governmental, corporate) involved in that event. Each person was asked to explain their headline, and the group collectively voted on headlines they found persuasive or provocative. The headlines were also constructed at the end of a 2-hour session in which these approaches were extensively discussed.

We analyze the results for content – distilled but imaginative complexes of risk, benefit, engagement, and governance of 8 climate interventions across 22 countries. We also analyze these headlines for their positive (hopeful, optimistic, utopic) vs. negative (concerning, pessimistic, dystopic) inclinations. Finally, we examine this method’s value for participatory and expedited futuring. It is small-N, designed for focus groups – but its simplicity has large-N applications: minimized to three elements of technology, actor, and event, with hundreds of ‘snapshots’. At the same time, it confronts and tests the capacity of individuals and mini-public to richly conceive of futures for immature climate interventions.