Conference Agenda

Carbon removal – the proposed creation, enhancement, and massive upscaling of carbon sinks to help contain the causes and impacts of climate change – has become a pillar of national and corporate commitments towards Net Zero, as well as pathways towards the Paris Agreement’s ambitious temperature targets. Public engagement is essential to gauging the feasibility and governability of these heterogenous – and often immature and radical – options. Though growing, this literature – public surveys and a lesser number of small-N workshops – has been concentrated in a handful of Northern countries, and on single technologies or small groupings. In this panel, we aim to build this literature in four ways. First, we expand the geographies and range of approaches that has thus far been covered in survey and engagement work. Next, we innovate mixed methods that emphasize deliberation and mutual learning. Third, we place a focus on expanding and including new types of actors and expertise, and on uncovering political and policy contexts that inform public and other ‘situated’ – or organization-, sectoral, or polity-driven – perspectives. Finally, we highlight the role of publics and other actors as more than passive recipients of information, and engage with their own self-conceptions and limits as drivers of (novel) assessment, civic and consumer activity, and (democratic) oversight of governmental and corporate activity in carbon removal across the global North and South.

A debate around the role of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in energy decarbonisation is conflicted. While CDR is largely seen as a necessity to balance out residual emissions from the so-called ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors in energy systems, CDR is at the same time viewed as an excuse to delay near-term emission reduction. In the scenario produced by integrated assessment models (IAMs), CDR is often assumed to be deployed on a massive scale for achieving net-zero CO2 emissions in a ‘least-cost’ or ‘cost-effective’ manner. However, such an assumption of large-scale CDR deployment in IAM scenarios has been widely criticised and its feasibility in the real world has been called into question. There are now new emerging scenarios in the IAM literature which explore alternative pathways to achieving net zero but minimising the use of CDR methods by focusing on the demand-side transformation of energy systems through lifestyle change and widespread electrification. Although these new IAM scenarios with little reliance on CDR broaden out the policy scope of achieving energy decarbonisation, they too face the same problem of feasibility as does the scenario with a heavy reliance on CDR. Since these net-zero energy scenarios have widely different social and political implications for energy systems in the future, it is important to explore how people make sense of different IAM scenarios as the ‘narrative’ of possible societal futures.

In this study, using qualitative focus groups with Japanese ordinary citizens, we analysed the public perception of three different net-zero energy scenarios in the IAM literature: (1) the continued use of fossil fuels with a heavy reliance on CDR; (2) energy demand reduction through lifestyle change and electrification; and (3) the production and widespread use of zero-emission synfuels through carbon capture technology. In particular, we looked into the perceived feasibility and desirability of different scenarios with and without relying on large-scale CDR deployment. Our result shows that there are a few broad themes that are commonly shared across different groups of people—that is, a sceptical view on geological CO2 storage, a strong reluctance to changing the current energy-intensive lifestyle and a blind optimism for technological breakthrough. More importantly, however, we find that the public conception of net-zero scenarios straddles the gap between what seems ‘feasible’ and ‘desirable’. In other words, people are actively struggling to find a middle-ground option that may not be necessarily socially desirable but more politically acceptable.

Carbon removal is emerging as a pillar of governmental and corporate commitments toward Net Zero. Ranging from agriculture, forestry, and ecosystems management to large-scale engineering systems, spread across terrestrial and marine environments and urban and rural communities – carbon removal at scales projected for Net Zero targets would implicate polities, geographies, and sectors across the global North and South.

Public engagement is essential to gauging the feasibility and governability of these heterogenous – and often immature and radical – carbon removal options. We conduct focus groups in 22 countries worldwide: 1 in North America, 3 in Central and South America, 8 in Europe, 2 in the Middle East, 3 in Africa, and 4 in the Indo-Pacific. Each country had 2 focus groups, in rural and urban settings. We analyze contextually rich understandings of benefits and risks and corresponding governance arrangements regarding five major types of carbon removal: (a) Afforestation, reforestation, ecosystems management (marine and terrestrial); (b) Soil Carbon Sequestration; (c) Direct Air Capture; (d) Enhanced Weathering; and (e) Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage

We highlight a multi-scale, actor- and locale-focused approach to deliberations, in which participants were encouraged to think of carbon removal in the most local context possible, and expand to national, regional and global levels. This revealed differences not only in scale, but in geopolitical, cultural, ethnic, technological, and economic dimensions. We map key technical and societal questions that national publics have on particular approaches, and how these translate to preferences – and varying degrees of trust – for named actors (expert networks, civic organizations, countries, and intergovernmental frameworks) and mechanisms (kinds of assessment, funding, and policy). We highlight public deliberation and sense-making under conditions of deep uncertainty, where carbon removal is diversely contextualized by awareness or personal experience of climate change, lived experience, political context, and imperfect analogical reasoning.

In this paper, we discuss a practice to combine life-cycle assessment (LCA) and open-ended scenarios to explore the full range of implications of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. The paper discusses ocean liming as a speculative technological system embedded in social, regulatory, and economic systems, and identifies critical uncertainties about its development in the European context. LCAs are used as a prompt for structured consultations with experts across industry, government, academia and non-governmental organisations, who engaged in deliberation over the potential implications of ocean alkalinisation in light of technical, political and material constraints. This deliberation highlights the land-based consequences of ocean liming, including mineral extraction and the need to sequester emissions generated in the lime production process. Methodologically, the paper stresses the importance of creating engaged publics, willing to consider the relevance and implications of CDR technologies that still exist, primarily, as hypothetical constructs.

While in post-Paris climate assessments and governance emerging technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as well as controversial proposals around sunlight reflection methods (SRM) have received growing attention, decisions on which approaches to pursue at large scale and how to govern them are only in formation.

In response to past controversies about science and technology and embedded in what some observers labelled a “participatory turn” or a “deliberative turn”, some sort of public engagement in this process is called for – be it for instrumental, normative, or substantive reasons. In contexts of high uncertainty, interconnectedness, and value plurality, who should be involved, in what way and when in the process, however, is contested. So what do diverse publics think about their own role when it comes to decision-making about complex and highly technical issues and which formats of engagement with CDR and SRM technologies do they consider meaningful and desirable?

This contribution is based on a qualitative study of public perceptions of CDR and SRM in 22 countries of the Global North and Global South (44 focus groups in urban and rural environments) that forms part of a wider mixed-methods and multi-technology study conducted in the ERC project “GeoEngineering and Negative Emissions Pathways in Europe” (GENIE). Grounded in constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation and engagement, we trace (i) how publics in diverse socio-political settings conceive of their own role, (ii) how conceptions of the public’s role vary in relation to scale and technology and (iii) what conditions for meaningful engagement and context-sensitive formats members of the public identify.

On this basis, we reflect on how accounting for diverse perspectives and local experiences can complement techno-scientific assessments and contribute to just, ethical and effective governance of emerging climate intervention technologies.