Social Science Sequestered (original) (raw)

PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Clim., 02 June 2020

Sec. Carbon Dioxide Removal

Volume 2 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2020.00002

Abstract

Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) raises many cultural, ethical, legal, social, and political issues, yet in the growing area of GGR research, humanities and social sciences (HASS) research is often marginalized, constrained and depoliticised. This global dynamic is illustrated by an analysis of the UK GGR research programme. This dynamic matters for the knowledge produced and for its users. Without HASS contributions, too narrow a range of perspectives, futures and issues will be considered, undermining or overpromising the prospects for the responsible development of GGR (and threatening worse side-effects), and limiting our understanding of why and how policy demands GGR solutions in the first place. In response, we present policy principles for bringing HASS fully into GGR research, organized around three themes: (1) HASS-led GGR research, (2) Opening up GGR futures, and (3) The politics of GGR futures.

Introduction

Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) techniques hold out the promise of removing GHGs from the atmosphere, at globally significant scales. GGR techniques are typically envisioned to have two explicit, inter-related roles in future climate policy. Firstly, to compensate for emissions that are especially hard to mitigate, e.g., some emissions from aviation and agriculture. Secondly, to subsequently reverse any “overshoot” of cumulative emissions above a safe limit (Royal Society, ).

The promise of future use of GGR techniques features in all the scenarios that underpin the Paris Agreement (Minx et al., ), having previously been increasingly adopted by modelers developing pathways to limit global warming to 2 or 1.5°C (Fuss et al., ; Beck and Mahony, ). Recently, several countries have committed to net-zero climate emission targets, for example, the UK and France by 2050, Sweden by 2045, Finland by 2035 and Norway by 2030, to be realized in part through GGR deployment or international offsetting (Darby, ; UK Government, 2019).

Some GGR techniques, such as afforestation, are in use, mainly for other purposes than climate mitigation, and far from at the scale envisioned in relation to current climate policy; others, such as direct air capture with carbon storage, are yet to be developed. There are large uncertainties and/or intense contestation as to their future use at scale, in terms of cost, effectiveness, resource availability, incentivisation, justice implications and acceptability among other aspects (Fuss et al., ; Minx et al., ; Nemet et al., ). The origin and form of policy demand for GGR has also come under scrutiny. Several authors have pointed out that betting on future GGR use is risky (Fuss et al., ) and also risks permitting a slower pace of emissions reductions in the short term (Anderson and Peters, ; McLaren, ; Markusson et al., ).

GGR brings together researchers from several pre-existing research communities, including modeling (Laude, ), carbon capture and storage (CCS), and land use (Minx et al., ). Minx et al. () show that there are distinct and diversifying research fields mapping onto specific techniques, but at the same time increasing connectivity (shared references) indicating emerging common discourses. Some initial dedicated government funding (notably the UK GGR programme, £8.6m, 2017-2021) has also appeared in the last few years, and the first international conferences (“Negative CO2 emissions” in Gothenburg, and “Negative Emissions: Integrating Industry, Technology and Society for Carbon Drawdown” in Canberra, both in 2018) have taken place. There is a risk that this emerging institutionalization locks-in problematic tendencies discussed below, unless action is taken. In this paper we argue that, to date, humanities and social sciences (HASS) research on GGR has been marginalized, constrained and depoliticised—like much other climate research (Hulme, ) and set out principles for integrating HASS into GGR research.

From Contentious Climate Geoengineering to Instrumental GGR Research

The notion of GGR (alongside similar concepts like Negative Emissions Techniques, NETs, and Carbon Dioxide Removal, CDR) used to be seen, alongside solar radiation management (SRM), as one of two kinds of climate geoengineering (Royal Society, ). But recently, GGR is more often being presented and constituted as a research field in its own right. The IPCC's 5th assessment report (2014) made a distinction between GGR (specifically CO2 removal, primarily bioenergy with CCS, BECCS) and SRM. Many models and scenarios included in the report used GGR to reach a 2°C target, some even at rates exceeding 20 Gt CO2/year (see e.g., p1315), whereas the report enumerated the many risks of SRM (WGII Section 19.5.4) and excluded it from the scenarios. By the time of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C warming (2018), GGR was presented as entirely separate1.

Despite heavily featuring modeling work, climate geoengineering research has stimulated a wide range of HASS contributions. For example, in the UK, the ESRC/AHRC funded project on Climate Geoengineering Governance, encompassed social science and humanities, including philosophy and law. This allowed for exploration of diverse issues such as problems of lock-in and path-dependence, and the impact of Confucian ethics on the social distribution of responsibility for climate change (Healey and Rayner, ). Among inspirations was the responsible research and innovation framework, emphasizing anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness, in earlier HASS geoengineering research (Stilgoe, ). From contrast, the emerging GGR field has a rather narrow range of HASS contributions, focusing heavily on instrumental questions of cost-efficient deployment modeling and public acceptance, more akin to CCS research (Markusson et al., ; Waller et al., 2020).

Whilst climate geoengineering research developed at arm's length to policy, the separate GGR research field is emerging in close interaction with climate policy making, and policy-oriented climate modeling, with consequences for how the field is constituted, what disciplines are included and how. Like policy-oriented climate change research generally (Hulme, ), a narrow, instrumental, techno-economic framing dominates, oriented toward answering the question: “GGR will be needed, how do we make it happen?”, and approached through economic optimisation of anticipated GGR deployment as compensation for recalcitrant emissions and emissions overshoot (McLaren, ). Beyond that techno-economic core, the language is one of risks and co-benefits (mainly environmental, but sometimes also social, political etc.). Out of more than 130 papers presented at the Gothenburg conference2, about 25% were purely technical studies, and about 40% were techno-economic studies, generally focused narrowly on cost implications (and led by engineers rather than economists). Less than 25% of contributions were from social scientists or economists, and very few from humanities researchers. At the Canberra conference3 roughly 10 of the 30 presentations were socio-economic contributions. The UK GGR programme is dominated by the natural sciences (here including physical, environmental and engineering sciences), reflecting the call specifications of the funders (NERC, ). Whilst about 40%4 of the participating researchers are social scientists in the broadest sense, approximately half of whom are economists, ten out of eleven projects (incl. all four larger consortia) are led by natural scientists. Humanities scholars are largely absent.

The UK GGR programme is also strongly focussed on policy makers as an audience. The research agenda is designed by and for them to underpin envisioned GGR deployment, and as a result tends toward the narrowly instrumental. The immediate UK GGR policy context contains the roots of the problem. For example, a prominent report (Royal Society, ) set out the technical potential of a set of GGR techniques, and has been influential on subsequent research policy. It deals somewhat with economic, legal and social issues, but overall the social dimension is reduced to one of limited public acceptability and understanding; the social understood as a mere barrier for deployment, and approached according to a long-discredited knowledge deficit theory (Wynne, 1991; Sturgis and Allum, 2004). Social science is not entirely “sequestered” and out of sight, but given a very narrow role. This analysis draws heavily on the UK case, and whilst supported by the international conference data, there may also be differences among countries' emergent GGR policies.

Why Does It Matter?

Crucially, the work of social scientists tends toward particular roles and topics. Mapping5 of the social science across the UK GGR programme shows that whilst the methods and the conceptual lenses applied vary, and there is some room for interpretative and critical social science (e.g. Markusson et al., ; McLaren et al., ; Waller et al., 2020; Pozo et al., ), the problems to address are predominantly seen through a narrow, instrumental frame: as drivers and barriers. For economists, the main focus is on costs; for other social scientists, public perceptions and acceptance. More specifically, we identify three main problems:

Bringing HASS Fully Into GGR Research

We here set out principles for bringing HASS out of sequestration and into GGR research more fully, which also address the problems identified above, structured as three themes:

Finally, HASS research can in these ways help explore new ways of governing technologies such as GGR, in ways that more fully take into account what is best for people (and planet).

Statements

Data availability statement

Some data is linked to in the paper - please see footnotes 2, 3 and 5. Beyond that, data is not sharable because of GDPR, or because it exists in working material format only. Any queries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics statement

This research was conducted according to the principles of local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author contributions

NM led the drafting of the paper, with contributions from all co-authors. NM and NB-O organized workshops and data collection about the UK GGR programme.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank participants in the two workshops for social scientists in the UK GGR programme, as well as those who helped us map the social science research in the programme.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References

Keywords

humanities and social sciences, GGR research, marginalized, constrained, depoliticised, UK GGR programme, research policy principles

Citation

Markusson N, Balta-Ozkan N, Chilvers J, Healey P, Reiner D and McLaren D (2020) Social Science Sequestered. Front. Clim. 2:2. doi: 10.3389/fclim.2020.00002

Edited by

Sabine Fuss, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Germany

Reviewed by

Dominic Lenzi, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Germany; Felix Schenuit, University of Hamburg, Germany

Updates

Copyright

© 2020 Markusson, Balta-Ozkan, Chilvers, Healey, Reiner and McLaren.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Nils Markusson n.markusson@lancaster.ac.uk

This article was submitted to Negative Emission Technologies, a section of the journal Frontiers in Climate

Disclaimer

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.