A Listening Session for the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment
The SCoPEx Advisory Committee held a virtual panel discussion on December 15th, 2021 at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting. The motivation for such a discussion was to gather feedback on various possible approaches to public engagement for SCoPEx from experts on public engagement and participants at AGU. We invited three individuals to participate in a moderated panel discussion that was followed by a question and answer session with town hall attendees.
Panel Participants:
- Edward Parson, Professor of Environmental Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles.
- Lisa Dilling, Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and former Director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado Boulder.
- Marion Hourdequin Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College.
Notes Taken by: Sally Klimp, Executive Coordinator for the SCoPEx Advisory Committee. Reviewed by three Advisory Committee members.
Below you will find the questions we asked panelists along with a brief summary of their thoughts. This town hall serves as another opportunity to hear from experts in social science and governance and is part of a broader ongoing consultative process with multiple stakeholders to design an engagement protocol for SCoPEx.
SCoPEx Advisory Committee Town Hall Video Preview:
The following ideas reflect responses from the panel participants and do not necessarily represent the views of the Advisory Committee:
1. Question to Professor Edward Parson: How does the precautionary principle apply to in-situ geoengineering research? What are the most productive and helpful ways to approach the concerns related to the moral hazard/slippery slope of geoengineering research?
- Professor Parson began by highlighting the possibility that governance for research can sometimes be a proxy for the desired outcome.
- For SCoPEx, the framing of the debate on whether or not to conduct small scale outdoor research has included strong and perhaps idiosyncratic precautionary terms and often conclusionary rhetoric.
- The concerns over solar geoengineering research are often selectively applied to field experiments like SCoPEx, but not to modeling and analysis even though both types apply equally to the knowledge about this solar geoengineering technology.
- Unlike some other research, there is not a direct mechanism for harm for humans or the environment at this scale.
- A precautionary approach should take into account the collection of implicated risks. For example:
- A weakened resolve for mitigation, adaptation, and removal of GHG.
- The possibility of misuse of information that emerges from research.
- Controversies that empower local actors to act on behalf of global values in a way that suggests that veto over research can be exercised by anyone anywhere.
- On the other hand, we need to consider the interlinkage to the risks of not doing research, such as:
- The risk that this technology could be used without advance research to understand unintended consequences. Controlling knowledge cannot fully control future action.
- The extremity of other responses that might be necessary also carry their own challenges/risks including injustices on how they are deployed.
- Public engagement is a necessary component for taking account of those risks outlined above.
- The main focus for taking account of multiple and diverse perspectives must be at the level of legitimate democratic governance, international agreement, and local consultations.
2. Question to Professor Lisa Dilling: What might inclusive engagement in these issues look like across local, global and regional scales. How about equitable decision-making?
- Professor Dilling referenced several research studies on engagement and highlighted best practices that emerged from this literature:
- Anticipation of possible futures – Put solar geoengineering research in context of the future we face.
- Concept of reflexivity – Scientists should have an iterative process to reflect on how their research is done along with the societal engagement process.
- Inclusion more broadly – Who should be participating? Open up the framing to increase the ways for people to participate on this topic.
- Responsiveness – Are researchers willing to listen and change plans based on public feedback? This also means there should be mutual respect between stakeholders and the researchers. Respect also implies a differential power relationship. Who has the power to decide? For scenarios in which indigenous people are involved, is it extractive? Or is it mutually beneficial?
- Controllability/the degree of containment – How broad is the impact? How much uncertainty? How reversible is this? Who are the researchers affiliated with? What is the ultimate purpose (knowledge vs. profit)?
Recommendations to the SCoPEx Advisory Committee from Professor Dilling:
- Conduct deliberative mapping and workshops on the ground.
- Work with researchers in more regions, not just the richest.
- Build the capacity for more nations to get involved.
- Engage the government structures in an interconnected way to conduct public engagement, including researcher engagement, public engagement and local engagement.
3. Question to Professor Marion Hourdequin: Can research in geoengineering advance climate justice, or at least avoid climate injustice, and what would that look like? What conditions does climate justice impose on this research?
- Professor Hourdequin shared some observations in regards to climate change and justice. Across nations, we see:
- Unequal contributions to climate change and inequitable impacts of climate change.
- Disparities in capacities and power to mitigate/adapt to shape climate negotiations and policies.
- This sets the stage for worries that various climate responses – even well intentioned – may recapitulate these patterns and compound existing injustices.
Dimensions of justice:
- Distributive – Who benefits, who is harmed, and in what ways and how much?
- Procedural/participatory – Who decides and how?
- Recognitional – Whose perspectives are heard and considered?
- Epistemic – Who has access to knowledge, who has the capacity to develop knowledge, and whose knowledge counts?
- Restorative/corrective – What constitutes a just response to past harms or injustices?
- Intergenerational – How will future generations be affected? How will decisions today shape the conditions and options available to future generations and communities?
- Ecological – How should solar geoengineering research, development, and decision making take account of nonhuman organisms and ecosystems?
Recommendations for moving forward from Professor Hourdequin:
- Social science and philosophical conversations should think more of procedural/participatory and recognitional justice.
- Ensure that research/policy does not further exacerbate the lack of agency for those in climate vulnerable communities.
- Expand the capacity of knowledge development worldwide.
- Research should be interdisciplinary, integrative, and inclusive.
- Include front end engagement in the development of questions for engagement.
- Involve researchers across the world with diverse perspectives and disciplines.
- Check power dynamics and economic vested interests.
- Develop research processes, priorities, and governance principles recursively through ongoing engagement.
4. Questions from the audience/wrap up.
In relation to knowledge production and capacity building, to what extent are you considering technical/scientific research and social science research?
Professor Dilling: Both should be expanded. We need more nations to have internal capacities to conduct engagement and research.
Professor Hourdequin: Collaboration across disciplines could be a way forward. Identify areas of concern in particular regions and design models that incorporate those variables.
- An international framework for this kind of outdoor research is needed to take the pressure off individual experiments and send a signal that there is a broader investment in engagement.
In what ways do the foundational principles of execution of the technical work and the public engagement and eventual decision whether or not to proceed with the SCoPEx experiment also apply to other Climate Intervention research and implementation? Does this apply differently for different experimental application scales, reversibility (e.g., carbon capture, utilization and storage, forestation, soil augmentation, ocean fertilization, etc.)?
Professor Parson: It is helpful to think hypothetically about these concerns in similar scenarios such as clinical research which has clear ethical principles related to non-harm, benefit, agency, informed consent, etc.
- Could this technology be used in a way that exacerbates social inequities?
- SCoPEx and others face similar questions.
- Another example, tracer studies in air and water that do change environmental systems.
- Many of the indirect precautionary concerns over solar geoengineering could be applied in principle to those as well.
Professor Dilling: Even with trust, research can still fail. There are probably other ways to deal with concerns while being respectful of local interests.
- It is not just physical risk, it is also the meaning of the experiment. Permissibility is a deep human question. This points to the legitimacy of public engagement.
How do you approach an experiment like SCoPEx differently? Something more inclusive from start to finish. From a timing perspective, is it possible to accomplish engagement/dialogue in the scope of this project?
Professor Dilling: We should have a program to help conduct engagement in a robust way.
- It’s a lot to ask every experiment to do a well designed engagement process.
- It would be beneficial to embed engagement into a broader framework where benefits/lessons/practices are shared.
- It is never too late, there are plenty of experts out there who can help create the process as long as SCoPEx is prepared to make changes in response to engagement outcomes.
Professor Hourdequin: It is difficult to design appropriate engagement in this truncated space of SCoPEx.
- There are probably ways to learn and iterate processes of engagement at multiple scales.
- It would be best for this experiment to be situated within a broader framework of public engagement and governance of solar geoengineering research: public engagement should be wider than engagement around a single experiment, though engagement is still important for individual experiments like SCoPEx.
Professor Parson: Harvard has the unique opportunity to go through this process with the Advisory Committee to responsibly work out a way to do this legitimately.
- I hope to see some practical insight on how to conduct engagement as a result of this project.
- On agency and voice – everyone feels a lack of agency in regards to climate change.
- Move forward thoughtfully and be careful of attributions from a sense of lack of agency that this isn’t a universal characteristic of the vastness of this problem. That is why it is difficult to construct processes that ease people’s concerns.