Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK

Anthropogenic influence on the climate – and possible societal responses to it – offers a unique window through which to examine the way people think about and relate to the natural world. This paper reports data from four, one-day deliberative workshops conducted with members of the UK public during early 2012. The workshops focused on geoengineering – the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment – as one of three possible responses to climate change (alongside mitigation and adaptation). Here, we explore one of the most pervasive and wide-ranging themes to emerge from the workshops: whether geoengineering represented an unprecedented human intervention into ‘nature’, and what the moral consequences of this might be. Using the concept of ‘messing with nature’ as an analytical lens, we explore public perceptions of geoengineering. We also reflect on why ‘messing with nature’ was such a focal point for debate and disagreement, and whether the prospect of geoengineering may reveal new dimensions to the way that people think about the natural world, and their relationship to it.     

Why geoengineering is not a ‘global public good’, and why it is ethically misleading to frame it as one

In early policy work, climate engineering is often described as a global public good. This paper argues that the paradigm example of geoengineering—stratospheric sulfate injection (hereafter ‘SSI’)—does not fit the canonical technical definition of a global public good, and that more relaxed versions are unhelpful. More importantly, it claims that, regardless of the technicalities, the public good framing is seriously misleading, in part because it arbitrarily marginalizes ethical concerns. Both points suggest that more clarity is needed about the aims of geoengineering policy—and especially governance—and that this requires special attention to ethics.     

Why geoengineering is a public good,even if it is bad

Stephen Gardiner argues that geoengineering does not meet the “canonical technical definition” of a global public good, and that it is misleading to frame geoengineering as a public good. A public good is something that is nonrival and nonexcludable. Contrary to Gardiner’s claims, geoengineering meets both of these criteria. Framing geoengineering as a public good is useful because it allows commentators to draw on the existing economic, philosophical, and social scientific literature on the governance of public goods.     

Governing geoengineering research: why, when and how?

Research on geoengineering – deliberate management of the Earth’s climate system – is being increasingly discussed within the science and policy communities. While justified as necessary in order to expand the range of options available to policy makers in the future, geoengineering research has already engendered public controversy. Proposed projects have been protested or cancelled, and calls for a governance framework abound. In this paper, we consider the reasons why geoengineering research might be subject to additional governance and suggest mechanisms that might be usefully applied in developing such a framework. We consider criteria for governance as raised by a review of the growing literature on geoengineering and other controversial scientific topics. We suggest three families of concern that any governance research framework must respond to: the direct physical risks of the research; the transparency and responsibility in decision making for the research; and the larger societal meanings of the research. We review what mechanisms might be available to respond to these three families of concern, and consider how these might apply to geoengineering research.     

Governing geoengineering research for the Great Barrier Reef

Coral reefs are highly vulnerable to the impacts of rising marine temperatures and marine heatwaves. Mitigating dangerous climate change is essential and urgent, but many reef systems are already suffering on current levels of warming. Geoengineering options are worth exploring to protect the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) from extreme warming conditions, but we contend that they require strong governance and public consultation from the outset. Australian governments are currently funding feasibility testing of three geoengineering proposals for the GBR. Each proposal involves manipulating ocean or atmospheric conditions to lower water temperatures and thereby reduce the threat of mass coral bleaching events. Innovative strategies to protect the GBR and field testing of these is essential, but current laws do not guarantee robust governance for field testing of these technologies. Nor do they provide the foundation for a more coherent national policy on climate intervention technologies more generally. Responsible governance frameworks, including detailed risk assessment and early public consultation, are necessary for geoengineering research to build legitimacy and promote scientific progress.

Key policy insights

• Marine heatwaves pose a serious threat to coral reefs, including Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef.

• Australian governments have recognized the threats of warming waters, and are funding research of geoengineering options for the Great Barrier Reef.

• The limited earlier field testing of geoengineering demonstrates the need for specific governance to manage risks, build legitimacy and maintain public support.

• Australia requires a framework to govern geoengineering research and development before deployment of such technologies.

     

Public values for energy system change

In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interdisciplinary approach. Through the research we identify a set of social values associated with desirable energy futures in the UK, where the values represent identifiable cultural resources people draw on to guide their preference formation about particular aspects of energy system change. As such, we characterise public perspectives as being underpinned by six value clusters relating to efficiency and wastefulness, environment and nature, security and stability, social justice and fairness, autonomy and power, and processes and change. We argue that this ‘value system’ provides a basis for understanding core reasons for public acceptance or rejection of different energy system aspects and processes. We conclude that a focus on values that underpin more specific preferences for energy system change brings insights that could provide a basis for improved dialogue, more robust decision-making, and for anticipating likely points of conflict in energy transitions.     

Rethinking urban water management: Experimentation as a way forward?

There is widespread acceptance regarding the need to transition towards more sustainable urban water practices. Supporting such a transition requires new governance frameworks that can accommodate complexity and uncertainty, and organisational cultures that embrace experimentation and learning. This empirically focused research paper examines how eleven, alternative local-scale experiments were initiated while operating in an unsympathetic regime. Furthermore, the perceptions of more than 150 urban water practitioners across Australia are presented, regarding the importance of and difficulty in undertaking experimentation in the urban water sector, and the necessary mechanisms for influencing a step change to sustainable urban water management practices. Interviewees revealed perceived limitations in experimenting with new technologies and practices when operating within a hierarchical and market-based governance paradigm. Also, industry conservatism and the dominant risk-based management approach both operate as significant constraints to promoting an experimentation culture, and are closely related to concerns about public health and financial implications. Overall, the research highlights the Australian urban water sector is willing to embrace learning-by-doing; however, a stronger emphasis on promoting an organisational and industry-wide culture of experimentation and learning is required. Policy implications for future water governance are discussed.     

Some whats, whys and worries of geoengineering

In this paper I discuss the nature of geoengineering, some of its attractions, and some reasons for concern. I claim that there is confusion in the use of the term ‘geoengineering’ that is related to larger concerns about the language in which responses to climate change are discussed. I conclude that despite some reasonable grounds for suspicion, research in areas that involve carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management should go on as part of the general portfolio of climate-related research, competing with the full panoply of other possible responses to climate change.     

Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its implications for governance

Solar radiation management techniques are a class of geoengineering methods designed to reflect some of the inbound sunlight back into space with the intended effect of arresting further warming of the planet and thus counteracting global warming. In this article we examine current debates on solar radiation management governance, clarifying a number of assumptions that persist and why these require further scrutiny. Building on existing research we articulate a more critical role that the social sciences should be playing in public engagement with solar radiation management. We develop a deliberative focus group methodology that aims to open up deliberation on the technology, focusing explicitly on the kinds of world that its deployment would bring into being. Our findings, based on an analysis of public discourse, suggest that solar radiation management would be publicly acceptable only under very specific, and highly contingent, conditions. Given the sensed implausibility of these conditions being realised in the real world, we set out the implications for solar radiation management governance. We explain why solar radiation management was perceived as likely to create a particular kind of world, one with an increased probability of geopolitical conflict, a new condition of global experimentality, and major threats to democratic governance. How to bring these issues into solar radiation management governance entails an important but challenging role for the social sciences.     

Contested energy futures: Shaping renewable energy narratives in Australia

Narratives and discourses are central to how we interpret and understand the world. The capacity to construct and disseminate compelling stories about particular issues is hence critical to an agent's capacity to advance their interests. This paper examines some of the main narratives through which the conversation about renewable energy in Australia takes place. We label these narratives feasibility (‘Pie in the Sky’); security (‘Keeping the Lights on’); cost (‘Costing the Earth’); and employment (‘Jobs Carnage’). Some of the most effective narratives are those that are constructed around some of the ‘legitimate’ concerns that pertain to an issue. The renewable energy narratives identified in this paper build on ‘reasonableness’ and ‘common sense’ concerns, and their effectiveness is determined as much by contextualising information absent from the energy conversation as present. While our focus is Australia, some of the narrative dynamics revealed have application to energy politics more broadly.     

International governance of a possible geoengineering intervention to combat climate change

This article explores international governance issues related to a possible future use of geoengineering techniques. Despite the serious arguments against geoengineering, policy-makers may start to take an interest in it in the medium term. The article identifies non-technical characteristics of geoengineering which might influence governance models, and then discusses three broad approaches: through the United Nations, by one state unilaterally, and through a consortium of states. An examination of international legal instruments reveals none that would pose an insuperable barrier to geoengineering. Finally, the article argues for early exploration of the technological, environmental, political and regulatory issues raised by geoengineering, to maximize the chances of good, science-based multilateral decision making if and when geoengineering’s day arrives.     

Public engagement on solar radiation management and why it needs to happen now

There have been a number of calls for public engagement in geoengineering in recent years. However, there has been limited discussion of why the public should have a say or what the public can be expected to contribute to geoengineering discussions. We explore how public engagement can contribute to the research, development, and governance of one branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), in three key ways: 1. by fulfilling ethical requirements for the inclusion of affected parties in democratic decision making processes; 2. by contributing to improved dialogue and trust between scientists and the public; and 3. by ensuring that decisions about SRM research and possible deployment are informed by a broad set of societal interests, values, and framings. Finally, we argue that, despite the nascent state of many SRM technologies, the time is right for the public to participate in engagement processes.     

Co-benefits,contradictions, and multi-level governance of low-carbon experimentation: Leveraging solar energy for sustainable development in China

Experimentation has emerged as an important strategy of climate governance, and China, with a distinctive experiment-based policy process, is a leading example of a state-led and coordinated approach to low-carbon experimentation. Through a case study of the photovoltaics poverty alleviation (PVPA) initiative—an ambitious and experimental programme that explores the synergy between renewable energy and sustainable development by using photovoltaics to generate income for impoverished households and communities—this paper critically examines this top-down mode of experimentation from a multi-level perspective based on Heilmann's experimentation under hierarchy framework. Drawing from empirical evidence collected over two years from a PVPA pilot, we show that China's multi-level approach to experimentation requires dynamic mechanisms that enable not only the adaptation of national-level models to specific locations but also the incorporation of local implementation lessons in national policymaking. The resulting experimental governance thus extends from a combination of top-down mechanisms of control, local responses, and the broader contradictions that emerge from their interactions.     

The ‘co’ in co-production of climate action: Challenging boundaries within and between science,policy and practice

Effective action taken against climate change must find ways to unite scientific and practice-based knowledges associated with the various stakeholders who see themselves as invested in the global delivery of climate governance. Political decision-makers, climate scientists and practitioners approach this challenge from what are often radically different perspectives and experiences. While considerable work has been done to develop the idea of ‘co-production’ in the development of climate action outputs, questions remain over how to best unite the contrasting epistemological traditions and norms associated with different stakeholders. Drawing on the existing literatures on climate action co-production and from translational perspectives on the science-policy interface, in this paper we develop the concept of ‘boundary agency’. Defining this as the agency ‘possessed’ when willing and able to translate between different epistemological communities invested in a similar policy and governance challenge such as climate change, we offer it as a useful means to reflect on participants’ understanding of the ‘co’ in co-production. This is in contrast to the more established (often academic-led) focus on what it is that is being produced by co-production processes. We draw from two complementary empirical studies, which explicitly encouraged i) engagement and ii) reflection on cross-boundary co-production between climate action stakeholders from different backgrounds. Reflecting on the two studies, we discuss the benefits of (and barriers to) encouraging more active and sustained engagement between climate action stakeholders so as to try to actively blur the boundaries between science and policy and, in doing so, invent new epistemological communities of practice.     

Technical characteristics of a solar geoengineering deployment and implications for governance

ABSTRACT

Consideration of solar geoengineering as a potential response to climate change will demand complex decisions. These include not only the choice of whether to deploy solar engineering, but decisions regarding how to deploy, and ongoing decision-making throughout deployment. Research on the governance of solar geoengineering to date has primarily engaged only with the question of whether to deploy. We examine the science of solar geoengineering in order to clarify the technical dimensions of decisions about deployment – both strategic and operational – and how these might influence governance considerations, while consciously refraining from making specific recommendations. The focus here is on a hypothetical deployment rather than governance of the research itself. We first consider the complexity surrounding the design of a deployment scheme, in particular the complicated and difficult decision of what its objective(s) would be, given that different choices for how to deploy will lead to different climate outcomes. Next, we discuss the on-going decisions across multiple timescales, from the sub-annual to the multi-decadal. For example, feedback approaches might effectively manage some uncertainties, but would require frequent adjustments to the solar geoengineering deployment in response to observations. Other decisions would be tied to the inherently slow process of detection and attribution of climate effects in the presence of natural variability. Both of these present challenges to decision-making. These considerations point toward particular governance requirements, including an important role for technical experts – with all the challenges that entails.

Key policy insights

• Decisions about solar geoengineering deployment will be informed not only by political choices, but also by climate science and engineering.

• Design decisions will pertain to the spatial and temporal goals of a climate intervention and strategies for achieving those goals.

• Some uncertainty can be managed through feedback, but this would require frequent operational decisions.

• Some strategic decisions will depend on the detection and attribution of climatic effects from solar geoengineering, which may take decades.

• Governance for solar geoengineering deployment will likely need to incorporate technical expertise for making short-term adjustments to the deployment and conducting attribution analysis, while also slowing down decisions made in response to attribution analysis to avoid hasty choices.

     

Policy innovation in a changing climate: Sources,patterns and effects

States have been widely criticized for failing to advance the international climate regime. Many observers now believe that a “new” climate governance is emerging through transnational and/or local forms of action that will eventually plug the resulting governance gaps. Yet states, which remain oddly absent from most discussions of the “new” governance, will remain key players as governance becomes more polycentric. This paper introduces a special issue that explores the ability of states to rise to these interconnected challenges through the analytical prism of policy innovation. It reveals that policy innovation is much more multi-dimensional than is often thought; it encompasses three vital activities: invention (centering on the ‘source’ of new policy elements), diffusion (that produces different ‘patterns’ of policy adoption), and the evaluation of the ‘effects’ that such innovations create in reality. The papers, which range from qualitative case studies to large ‘n’ quantitative studies, offer new insights into the varied roles that states play in relation to all three.They show, for instance that: the policy activity of states has risen dramatically in the past decade; that state innovation is affected to similar degrees by internal and external factors; and that policies that offer flexibility to target groups on how to meet policy goals are most effective but that voluntary reporting requirements are ineffective. This paper draws upon these and many other insights to offer a much more nuanced reflection on the future of climate governance; one that deservedly puts states at the front and center of analysis.     

The Oxford Principles

Scientific momentum is increasing behind efforts to develop geoengineering options, but it is widely acknowledged that the challenges of geoengineering are as much political and social as they are technical. Legislators are looking for guidance on the governance of geoengineering research and possible deployment. The Oxford Principles are five high-level principles for geoengineering governance. This article explains their intended function and the core societal values which they attempt to capture. Finally, it proposes a framework for their implementation in a flexible governance architecture through the formulation of technology-specific research protocols.     

Knowing like a global expert organization: Comparative insights from the IPCC and IPBES

In this paper we draw on Science and Technology (STS) approaches to develop a comparative analytical account of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The establishment of both of these organizations, in 1988 and 2012 respectively, represented important ‘constitutional moments’ in the global arrangement of scientific assessment and its relationship to environmental policymaking. Global environmental assessments all share some similarities, operating at the articulation between science and policy and pursuing explicit societal goals. Although the IPCC and IPBES have different objectives, they are both intergovernmental processes geared towards the provision of knowledge to inform political debates about, respectively, climate change and biodiversity loss. In spite of these similarities, we show that there are significant differences in their knowledge practices and these differences have implications for environmental governance. We do this by comparing the IPCC and IPBES across three dimensions: conceptual frameworks, scenarios and consensus .We argue that, broadly speaking, the IPCC has produced a ‘view from nowhere’, through a reliance on mathematical modelling to produce a consensual picture of global climate change, which is then ‘downscaled’ to considerations of local impacts and responses. By contrast IPBES, through its contrasting conceptual frameworks and practices of argumentation, appears to seek a ‘view from everywhere’, inclusive of epistemic plurality, and through which a global picture emerges through an aggregation of more placed-based knowledges. We conclude that, despite these aspirations, both organizations in fact offer ‘views from somewhere’: situated sets of knowledge marked by politico-epistemic struggles and shaped by the interests, priorities and voices of certain powerful actors. Characterizing this ‘somewhere’ might be aided by the concept of institutional epistemology, a term we propose to capture how particular knowledge practices become stabilized within international expert organizations. We suggest that such a concept, by drawing attention to the institutions’ knowledge practices, helps reveal their world-making effects and, by doing so, enables more reflexive governance of both expert organizations and of global environmental change in general.     

1.5℃温控目标下地球工程问题剖析和应对政策建议

《巴黎协定》引入了全球应对气候变化的1.5℃温控目标,但是没有就其实现路径做出清晰安排。实现1.5℃目标对全球减排提出更高要求,各国自主贡献目标距离该目标有较大差距,常规减排技术和政策也很难完成任务。在此背景下,国际上有关地球工程的讨论日渐升温。《巴黎协定》实际上已经包含了人工造林,碳捕获与封存/碳捕获与利用技术（CCS/CCUS),生物质能利用加CCS（BECCS）等负排放技术,这些都是地球工程范畴的碳移除技术（CDR),除此之外,更具争议性的太阳辐射管理（SRM）技术也引起更多关注。地球工程作为非常规技术选项,在1.5℃目标下的影响评估、技术选择、伦理学和国际治理等一系列问题的研究和探讨都十分必要。本文在分析和探讨上述问题的基础上,就中国应重视和加强地球工程研究与应对提出一些政策建议,指出要将地球工程纳入中国应对气候变化战略大框架,围绕1.5℃目标加强地球工程科学研究,并积极参与地球工程国际治理,合理发出中国声音。