Making sense of climate engineering: a focus group study of lay publics in four countries

In December 2015, the international community reached a landmark agreement in Paris to limit global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, achieving this ambitious goal will require global deployment of technologies for net negative emissions (IPCC 2013). This prompted renewed scientific and policy discussions about the role of climate engineering technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as well as solar radiation management (SRM) (Smith et al. 2016).¹

In light of such discussions, many scholars argue that there is an urgent need to assess the proposed climate engineering options from social and natural scientific perspectives (Healey and Rayner 2015). Climate engineering is a controversial topic in the scientific debates (Stilgoe 2015). For many observers, the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degree ambition was considered provocative as it requires immediate radical emission cuts and measures that enable net negative emissions to offset the effects of greenhouse gases, i.e. climate engineering (Guillemont 2017). One stance in the climate engineering debate presents the proposals as undesirable, unreliable and even incompatible with democracy (e.g. Hulme 2014; Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013) while an opposing stance argues that it should at least be considered, or tested in small scale field experiments (e.g. Keith 2013). Social scientists have issued repeated calls to open up the framings of climate engineering and to explore broader public views of the prospects of engineering the global climate (Bellamy et al. 2016; Corner and Pidgeon 2010; Sugiyama et al. 2016). However, climate engineering is still largely unfamiliar to lay publics around the world (Wright et al. 2014).

This paper starts from the assumption that the analysis of lay people’s sense-making is pertinent to research into global environmental change. As ‘social processes [are] embedded in specific social systems’ (Hackman and St.Clair 2012: 15), it is crucial to understand how the causes of, impacts of and responses to global environmental change are interpreted not only by experts and decision makers, but also by lay publics who likely draw on local knowledge and culturally conditioned interpretative frames. More specifically, engaging lay publics in an ‘upstream’ stage of the research and development of high-stake technologies such as climate engineering helps spur discussion of ‘desired futures’ (Corner and Pidgeon 2010: 32), and can identify ethical and justice concerns (McLaren et al. 2016).

This paper aims to explore how lay focus group participants in different cultural contexts make sense of the largely unfamiliar idea of large-scale technical interventions in the global climate. The study offers an in-depth exploration of pathways used by the study’s participants to create meaning regarding climate engineering in the absence of strong related opinions, predispositions and given framings. The paper makes a novel contribution to research on lay representations of climate engineering by exploring focus group participants’ sense-making in four geographically and culturally diverse countries: Japan, New Zealand, the USA and Sweden. By understanding sense-making of an unfamiliar technological issue, the paper also contributes to the broader literature of how individuals reach opinions about potentially controversial technologies.

Climate engineering is seen as an ideal case for ‘upstream public engagement’ (Sugiyama et al. 2016) as many of the proposed techniques are still hypothetical, or very early in the research stage, and social representations are unlikely to have formed. Corner and Pidgeon (2010) argue that public deliberation should be upstream, conducted by non-partisan organisations, include participants in forming agendas and be as representative and culturally diverse as possible.

Previous studies of public understanding of and engagement with climate engineering are mainly from the UK, North America (Bellamy et al. 2016; Corner et al. 2013; Kahan et al. 2015; Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013; Pidgeon et al. 2012, 2013) and Germany (Amelung and Funke 2015; Braun et al. 2017; Merk et al. 2016), with a few exceptions from Sweden (Wibeck et al. 2015), Australia/New Zealand (Wright et al. 2014) and Switzerland (Sütterlin and Siegrist 2016). These studies map various and sometimes contradictory findings of public views on climate engineering. For instance, the Australian and New Zealand surveys (Wright et al. 2014) find generally negative views of climate engineering, particularly SRM techniques, while a few surveys in Canada, the UK and the USA report some support for SRM research (Carr et al. 2013). The UK focus group findings of Macnaghten and Szerszynski (2013), however, indicated that participants became more sceptical of climate engineering when faced with ‘more realistic’ descriptions of SRM. Merk et al. (2016) discount the ‘moral hazard’ argument that SRM might reduce incentives for taking action on mitigation; instead, people were more inclined to emphasise the importance of mitigation.

Previous qualitative research (e.g., Corner et al. 2013; Wibeck et al. 2015) illustrated how lay people draw on various cultural narratives and linguistic strategies to make sense of climate engineering. While these studies were conducted in the global North, this paper expands the geographical and cultural scope and the empirical basis of the previous research into lay sense-making about climate engineering.

We refer to ‘sense-making’ as an interactive process by which people understand, describe and relate to their surroundings (Wibeck and Linnér forthcoming). From this perspective, sense-making is not a purely cognitive process occurring in individual minds; rather, meaning is created in interaction with others, influenced by interactions between different ideas and arguments and shaped in relation to broader socio–cultural narratives and traditions (Marková et al. 2007).

Inspired by the interactionist view of sense-making, we employed a focus group method in the format of semi-structured interviews guided by a moderator and lasting 1–2 hours each (Wibeck et al. 2007). Focus groups are productive for analysing not only what participants think about various topics but also how they make sense of unfamiliar, controversial, or complex issues—i.e. ‘joint meaning-making in action’ (Wilkinson 2016). In particular, focus groups are useful for studying new topics emerging in public debate because they allow insights into how social representations are shaped (Marková et al. 2007).

In total, we conducted 23 focus groups involving 136 participants. Recruitment of focus group participants was topic blind, as climate engineering was not mentioned in the recruiting process. This prevented participants from reading up on climate engineering in advance, allowing spontaneous reactions rather than prepared responses. While each focus group was internally homogeneous in at least one key respect, our sample as a whole displays a wide range of cultural, geographical and socio–economic backgrounds (see Supplementary material, Table 1). The focus groups were held in regional university towns (in NZ, the USA and Sweden) and in a large metropolitan city (in Japan).

We first conducted the Swedish focus groups (Wibeck et al. 2015). Subsequent focus groups in Japan, New Zealand and the USA were slightly modified versions of the Swedish case, adjusted for their respective national contexts but preserving the main structure and including all the same questions. The focus group discussions started with open-ended questions that avoided predetermined frames. Information about climate engineering was gradually introduced during the sessions, allowing examination of participant reactions to common dominant frames in the scientific discourse, such as ‘the climate emergency’ and ‘moral hazard’ arguments (Merk et al. 2016; Nerlich and Jaspal 2012). All data were transcribed verbatim.

We conducted a horizontal analysis to explore recurrent themes and sense-making strategies across the data. First, we conducted a thematic analysis of each country’s focus group discussions, segmenting and categorising the data according to the questions in the topic guide. To capture variations in the data, we also recorded topics that the participants raised spontaneously. From this initial analysis, we formulated themes that summarised larger parts of the focus group discussions.

Second, we scrutinised how participants made sense of climate engineering, by identifying and taking note of the various communicative strategies participants used to order, sort, and evaluate ideas related to climate engineering (cf. Wibeck and Linnér forthcoming). After this first inventory of sense-making strategies, we focused the analysis on one recurrent sense-making strategy that was common across the focus groups, i.e. categorization: comparing the unfamiliar topic of climate engineering with other more familiar topics (cf. Marková et al. 2007). In categorising climate engineering, participants specifically used analogies between climate engineering and other, more familiar issues. While context-dependent and reflective of culturally specific conditions, many of these analogies could still be grouped into categories based on the types of arguments they expressed. A second strategy used by participants to categorise climate engineering was the use of metaphorical language. Similar to analogies, metaphors are powerful sense-making resources that highlight some aspects of a phenomenon while downplaying others (Nerlich and Jaspal 2012).

When interpreting this study’s results, two caveats should be kept in mind. First, the fact that participants seemed to take anthropogenic climate change seriously, with very few expressing sceptical opinions about climate change, may have influenced their views of climate engineering. This is particularly notable in the case of the US focus groups, where, contrary to the country’s divided public opinion,² the participants all claimed to be concerned about climate change. Second, in Sweden, New Zealand and the USA—but not in Japan—the expression ‘global environmental issues’ was mentioned when recruiting participants. This may have helped attract participants with a particular interest in the environment to the first three countries’ groups, while less so in the Japanese groups. However, the data as a whole captured variation in whether participants claimed to be interested in environmental issues. For example, in Sweden, several participants explicitly said they had no such interest, while several of the Japanese participants expressed their interest in the environment although this had not been mentioned in the focus group invitation.

We sought both commonalities and variations in participants’ sense-making across the focus groups. Surprisingly, we found clear commonalities concerning initial affective reactions to information about climate engineering, the participants’ reasoning and explanations regarding their reactions, as well as the participants’ final positions regarding climate engineering options.

Evaluating climate engineering requires lay persons to consider the associated risks and unknowns of new and hypothetical concepts. In the past, members of the public were thought to have a ‘deficit’ of knowledge that hindered their understanding of science and technology (Corner et al. 2011). However, recent research concludes that even with limited familiarity, lay persons are often able to reason and participate in debate about risks in science and technology. Lay persons may come into a research situation with limited knowledge of the research subject yet many participate in discussions wholeheartedly by drawing on shared cultural narratives (Corner et al. 2013; Macnaghten et al. 2015).

Building on earlier literature arguing for the importance of upstream public engagement with emerging high-stake technologies (e.g. Corner and Pidgeon 2010: 32), this paper contributes further insights into similarities and variations in how lay sense-making occurred (cf. Burns et al. 2016; Davies 2011) by analysing how analogies and metaphors served as tools for the focus group participants in grappling with ontological, epistemological and ethical aspects of climate engineering. As such, analogies and metaphors were key communicative resources in the focus groups, serving at least three types of rhetorical purposes.

First, in struggling with coming to grips with and describing what climate engineering might entail, participants tried out comparisons with other technologies or phenomena that proved meaningful in their particular contexts, for example when Swedish participants compared the large-scale climate engineering proposals with large-scale nuclear power, which has long been a controversial issue in public debate in Sweden, or when Japanese participants related to transport infrastructure.

Second, similar to what has been found in analyses of public engagement with other new and emerging technologies such as GMO (Horlick-Jones et al. 2007), nanotechnology (Schwarz-Plaschg 2016) or information- and communication technology (Wyatt 2004), analogies and metaphors were not only used for description but more so for argumentation. Participants used them to anticipate and pass judgements on potential future developments (cf. Schwarz-Plaschg 2016; Wyatt 2004) as well as to evaluate the acceptability of climate engineering; an assessment which often ended in rejection due to anticipated negative side effects and ethical problems.

Third, as the focus group discussions, with few exceptions, ended in negative views of the prospects of climate engineering, an inevitable question triggered by climate engineering seemed to be: what sort of planet and/or world do we want to live in? (cf. Macnaghten and Szerszynski 2013). Here, analogies and metaphors played important roles in the participants’ conceptualization of human–nature relationships (cf. Corner et al. 2013). In a previous study, Nerlich and Jaspal (2012) showed that the UK media discourses of climate engineering were based on three metaphorical concepts of the planet (‘body’, ‘patient/addict’, and ‘machine’). Similarly, the five dominant climate engineering themes identified in our analysis can be seen as rooted in different conceptions of the planet: (1) ‘the planet as a complex social-ecological system’, (2) ‘the planet as a patient addicted to fossil fuels’ and (3) ‘the planet as a political object of global sustainability’.

The first theme (‘side effects and losing control’) seems to be rooted in the conception of ‘the planet as a complex social-ecological system’ in which the socio–economic and biophysical spheres are intrinsically inseparable and interconnected. The analogies with foreign invasive species into indigenous ecosystems or with technology-based alterations of nature (e.g. dams, DDT, and GMOs) were used to highlight the complexity of human–environment interactions in the Earth system and the unpredictability and uncontrollability of technological intervention in nature, which led to the scepticism about climate engineering. The second (‘symptom treatment’) and third (‘lifestyle change’) themes centred on criticism of climate engineering as an end-of-pipe technology and a distraction from substantive mitigation efforts, which can be seen as based in a conception of ‘the planet as a patient addicted to fossil fuels’. Through medical analogies, participants diagnosed consumerist cultures and lifestyles as fundamental causes of the climate change problem and blamed climate engineering as treating only the symptoms. While the ‘medical fix’ metaphors in scientific discourse tend to justify climate engineering as a cure for the planet’s ills (Nerlich and Jaspal 2012), our focus group participants employed medical analogies to question it as a misguided treatment that keeps the patient (human society) addicted to fossil fuels rather than curing the disease. Last, the fourth (‘need for political solutions’) and fifth (‘keeping the door ajar’) themes shared the same vision that politics-as-usual is not an option, which seemingly rests on a conception of ‘the planet as a political object of global sustainability’. The fourth theme envisions the radical transformation of today’s political systems as the pathway to achieve global sustainability by perceiving climate engineering as a wake-up call for world politics. On the other hand, the fifth theme suggests that in a state of emergency exceeding dangerous climate thresholds, all available options, including climate engineering as a last resort, must be sought to strive for global sustainability.

The frequent use of categorizations through analogies and metaphors in the focus groups suggests that sense-making of climate engineering largely occurred through drawing out similarities between climate engineering and other issues which were more familiar to the participants. Notwithstanding, one could argue that at an overarching level, the focus group discussions also particularised climate engineering proposals as distinct from other emerging technologies (cf. Billig 1996). Similar particularization can be observed in the scientific literature. Unlike climate engineering, many other emerging technologies with potentially transformative impacts on society, such as genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology and nuclear power, have significant proportions of promoters and enthusiasts and are rhetorically tightly coupled with progressive and even utopian ideals that climate engineering lacks (Anshelm and Hansson 2014a, 2014b). By contrast, a review of peer-reviewed papers on climate engineering published between 2006 and 2013 found that few scientific publications ended in an explicit ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to climate engineering, and that less than 2% or the reviewed papers unconditionally advocated deployment (Linnér and Wibeck 2015). A common recommendation in the research literature is that more research and experimentation is needed, though such recommendations are accompanied by calls for caution (Dilling and Hauser 2013). Very few hopes of positive side effects, such as increased food production or economic growth, are connected to climate engineering (e.g. Linnér and Wibeck 2015). Expectations for climate engineering can even be described as negative or dystopian: scientists do not promise to succeed in developing climate engineering, and eventual deployment may not even benefit society aside from a chance of negating another major harm (i.e. climate change) (Anshelm and Hansson 2014a, 2014b).

Our focus group participants raised concerns that were significantly similar to those raised in scientific discourse, despite their generally low prior awareness of climate engineering. The participants could hardly identify any positive co-benefits of climate engineering beyond mere climate risk avoidance. On the contrary, participants identified grand-scale environmental risks and fundamental scientific and technological limitations in controlling these proposed technologies and their unintended consequences. Those participants who still advocated research into climate engineering primarily categorised it as a ‘last resort’, a means to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change, thus any support for climate engineering was weak and heavily conditioned.

In future studies, it would be valuable to undertake a more in-depth exploration of the factors that led lay people to engage in sense-making strategies including those identified above, and to pay further attention to the interplay between categorization and particularization strategies for sense-making. Such studies may include focus groups on other technologies for comparison purposes. Another option would be to focus the discussions on particular climate engineering proposals rather than on the overarching idea of large-scale technological climate interventions. For example, in the wake of the Paris agreement in December 2015, net negative emissions via CDR, particularly bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), has reached the international climate agendas. The BECCS method already constitutes an important key for mitigation in several national long-term strategies, even though its practicality is not proven and several crucial societal aspects have not been deliberated over in wider contexts, if at all (Creutzig et al. 2014). The present study showed that although the focus group interviews had their main focus on how participants made sense of the overarching idea of climate engineering, the participants often chose to focus the discussions on the riskier and less controllable SRM options, arguably contributing to the more sceptical stances (cf. Sütterlin and Siegrist 2016). Communicating SRM and BECCS bundled together may, as shown in the present study, steer focus towards the more spectacular high-risk SRM options, and may also relativize the risks of BECCS, which also seem significant if assessed in isolation from SRM (e.g. loss of biodiversity, land-use conflicts, storage safety and water shortage; Buck 2016). In line with Buck (2016), we see a need for further exploration of sense-making about BECCS since many significant societal problems related to scaling up that method are not investigated and poorly understood.