This page is also available for download as a PDF.
November 12, 2021
The SCoPEx Advisory Committee held a virtual panel discussion on October 7th, 2021 at the Climate Engineering in Context Conference (CEC21). The rationale was to provide a forum for discussion and to collect feedback on various possible approaches to public engagement for SCoPEx.
After providing a brief background of the project and the Advisory Committee’s goals, we used breakout groups to hold open discussions around 2 specific questions. Below we list the questions and a summary of the discussions. We are grateful for these ideas and recommendations and intend to continue engaging with multiple stakeholders in designing a stakeholder engagement protocol for SCoPEx going forward.
The following ideas were suggested from the audience and do not necessarily represent the views of the Advisory Committee:
Topic 1: How should the Committee engage people local to the research site as well as large numbers of diverse global citizens including Indigenous peoples in an effective engagement?
- Engagement should begin early and should be continuous
- Engagement process should take place before a location is selected. In fact, choice of location should actually benefit from the engagement process
- Process should be designed for inclusive deliberation with a mechanism for ongoing responsiveness.
- Consider an ethnographic approach to better understand the local communities, their value systems, and their decision-making processes
- Engagement should be situated culturally and contextually specific
- Interactive to allow for power/knowledge balances
- Be explicit about the purpose of engagement and how the outcomes will be shared
- Emphasis on transparency in discussions with communities, NGOs, local groups and governments
- Iterative process with multiple meetings and a large enough group for peer interaction, not just deferring to experts
- Possibility of using scenario development exercises to help people to think together about possible futures, mutual learning, understanding
Topic 2: What criteria would one use for a go/no go decision?
- Criteria should be developed from engagement through a collective decision making process
- Does not have to be binary; conditional go/no-go is another option
- Possible choices
- Unconditional “go” / conditional “go”
- Permanent “no go” / temporary “no go” / conditional “no go”
- Possible choices
- Start from criteria already developed (Oxford principles, Code of Conduct)
- Process needs safeguards against triggering ‘mitigation deterrence’, with clear measures for reversibility of the experiment and the overall program/process
- Consider the time value of knowledge
- Criteria for go-no-go should be an output of engagement exercises, rather than defined beforehand
- The climate change context in which the decision is taking place is key