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Question-Led Innovation: Public priorities for enhanced weathering research in Malaysia
31/12/2024
Emily Cox, Robin Lim, Elspeth Spence, Melissa Payne, David Beerling, Nick Pidgeon
When upscaling novel techniques for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), public attitudes are crucial, yet there is a serious lack of social science research outside of Western nations. CDR research can clearly benefit from maximising inclusion and opening up to diverse perspectives, including those of local communities, and ideally should involve public insight into the questions we should be prioritising. This paper reports results from a major deliberative study on public perceptions of CDR in Malaysia. We demonstrate a novel, transferrable methodology called “Question-Led Innovation”, in which lay public and local stakeholders are empowered to ask actionable questions on a novel intervention or innovation. These questions are then used as the basis for identifying priorities for future scientific research. We apply the methodology to a case study of CDR via Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) on tropical palm oil agriculture in Sabah.
Attention and positive sentiments towards carbon dioxide removal have grown on social media over the past decade
10/12/2024
Tim Repke, Finn Müller-Hansen, Emily Cox & Jan C. Minx
Scaling up CO2 removal is crucial to achieve net-zero targets and limit global warming. To engage with publics and ensure a social licence to deploy large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR), better understanding of public perceptions of these technologies is necessary. Here, we analyse attention and sentiments towards ten CDR methods using Twitter data from 2010 to 2022. Attention towards CDR has grown exponentially, particularly in recent years. Overall, the discourse on CDR has become more positive, except for BECCS. Conventional CDR methods are the most discussed and receive more positive sentiments. Various types of users engage with CDR on Twitter to different degrees: While users posting little about CDR pay more attention to methods with biological sinks, frequently engaged users focus more on novel CDR methods. Our results complement survey studies by showing how awareness grows and perceptions change over time.
Advancing nature-based solutions through enhanced soil health monitoring in the United Kingdom
08/12/2024
Licida M. Giuliani, Emily Warner, Grant A. Campbell, John Lynch, Alison C. Smith, Pete Smith
Soil health is a critical component of nature-based solutions (NbS), underpinning ecosystem multifunctionality and resilience by supporting biodiversity, improving carbon sequestration and storage, regulating water flow and enhancing plant productivity. For this reason, NbS often aim to protect soil health and restore degraded soil. Robust monitoring of soil health is needed to adaptively manage NbS projects, identify best practices and minimize trade-offs between goals, but soil assessment is often underrepresented in NbS monitoring programmes. This paper examines challenges and opportunities in selecting suitable soil health metrics.
Countries need to provide clarity on the role of carbon dioxide removal in their climate pledges
22/11/2024
William F Lamb, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Giacomo Grassi, Stephen M Smith, Matthew J Gidden, Oliver Geden, Artur Runge-Metzger, Naomi E Vaughan, Gregory Nemet, Injy Johnstone, Ingrid Schulte, Jan C Minx
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) involves capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it for decades to millennia. Alongside deep emissions reductions, CDR is required for meeting the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement (IPCC 2022). However, parties to the agreement do not currently distinguish CDR from emissions reductions in their climate pledges. In this perspective, we argue that this lowers transparency and hinders the assessment of how credible and ambitious mitigation plans are.
Geological Net Zero and the need for disaggregated accounting for carbon sinks
18/11/2024
Myles R. Allen, David J. Frame, Pierre Friedlingstein, Nathan P. Gillett, Giacomo Grassi, Jonathan M. Gregory, William Hare, Jo House, Chris Huntingford, Stuart Jenkins, Chris D. Jones, Reto Knutti, Jason A. Lowe, H. Damon Matthews, Malte Meinshausen, Nicolai Meinshausen, Glen P. Peters, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Sarah Raper, Joeri Rogelj, Peter A. Stott, Susan Solomon, Thomas F. Stocker, Andrew J. Weaver, Kirsten Zickfeld
Achieving net zero global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), with declining emissions of other greenhouse gases, is widely expected to halt global warming. CO2 emissions will continue to drive warming until fully balanced by active anthropogenic CO2 removals. For practical reasons, however, many greenhouse gas accounting systems allow some “passive” CO2 uptake, such as enhanced vegetation growth due to CO2 fertilisation, to be included as removals in the definition of net anthropogenic emissions. By including passive CO2 uptake, nominal net zero emissions would not halt global warming, undermining the Paris Agreement. Here we discuss measures addressing this problem, to ensure residual fossil fuel use does not cause further global warming: land management categories should be disaggregated in emissions reporting and targets to better separate the role of passive CO2 uptake; where possible, claimed removals should be additional to passive uptake; and targets should acknowledge the need for Geological Net Zero, meaning one tonne of CO2 permanently restored to the solid Earth for every tonne still generated from fossil sources. We also argue that scientific understanding of net zero provides a basis for allocating responsibility for the protection of passive carbon sinks during and after the transition to Geological Net Zero.
Global Carbon Budget 2024
13/11/2024
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Judith Hauck, Peter Landschützer, Corinne Le Quéré, Hongmei Li, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Are Olsen, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Almut Arneth, Vivek Arora, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Carla F. Berghoff, Henry C. Bittig, Laurent Bopp, Patricia Cadule, Katie Campbell, Matthew A. Chamberlain, Naveen Chandra, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Thomas Colligan, Jeanne Decayeux, Laique Djeutchouang, Xinyu Dou, Carolina Duran Rojas, Kazutaka Enyo, Wiley Evans, Amanda Fay, Richard A. Feely, Daniel J. Ford, Adrianna Foster, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Giacomo Grassi, Luke Gregor, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Jens Heinke, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Andrew R. Jacobson, Atul Jain, Tereza Jarníková, Annika Jersild, Fei Jiang, Zhe Jin, Etsushi Kato, Ralph F. Keeling, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Siv K. Lauvset, Nathalie Lefèvre, Zhu Liu, Junjie Liu, Lei Ma, Shamil Maksyutov, Gregg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Patrick McGuire, Nicolas Metzl, Natalie M. Monacci, Eric J. Morgan, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Craig Neill, Yosuke Niwa, Tobias Nützel, Lea Olivier, Tsuneo Ono, Paul I. Palmer, Denis Pierrot, Zhangcai Qin, Laure Resplandy, Alizée Roobaert, Thais M. Rosan, Christian Rödenbeck, Jörg Schwinger, T. Luke Smallman, Stephen Smith, Reinel Sospedra-Alfonso, Tobias Steinhoff, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Roland Séférian, Shintaro Takao, Hiroaki Tatebe, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Olivier Torres, Etienne Tourigny, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido van der Werf, Rik Wanninkhof, Xuhui Wang, Dongxu Yang, Xiaojuan Yang, Zhen Yu, Wenping Yuan, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Ning Zeng, Jiye Zeng
The Global Carbon Budget 2024 describes the methodology, main results, and data sets used to quantify the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land ecosystems, and the ocean over the historical period (1750–2024). These living datasets are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
Including the More-Than-Human World in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI): Developing a Conceptual Framework
11/11/2024
Catherine Price, Tom Bott, Vicky Bowskill, Min Burdett, Amy Gibbons, Heather Gilbert, Lottie Hawkins, Pru Hobson-West, Jessica Holmes, Tim Hounsome, Billie Ireland, Will Meredith, Chrysanthi Michelaki, Kate Millar, Carol Morris, Perry Walker, Laurie Waller, Miranda Whall
This document summarises the Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science (ACCESS) project. The aim of the project was to design, co-produce and provide a conceptual framework for including the more-than-human world (animals, plants, soil, water, land etc.) within responsible research and innovation (RRI). RRI is a process of research and development that considers science and technological developments within a wider context. The RRI process has been adopted by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Questionable devices: Applying a large language model to deliberate carbon removal
06/11/2024
Laurie Waller, David Moats, Emily Cox, Rob Bellamy
This paper presents a device-centred approach to deliberation, developed in deliberative workshops appraising methods for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Our approach involved deploying the Large Language Model application ChatGPT (sometimes termed “generative AI”) to elicit questions and generate texts about carbon removal. We develop the notion of the “questionable” device to foreground the informational unruliness ChatGPT introduced into the deliberations. The analysis highlights occasions where the deliberative apparatus became a focus of collective critique, including over: issue definitions, expert-curated resources, lay identities and social classifications. However, in this set-up ChatGPT was all too often engaged unquestioningly as an instrument for informing discussion; its instrumental lure disguising the unruliness it introduced into the workshops. In concluding, we elaborate the notion of questionable devices and reflect on the way carbon removal has been “devised” as a field in want of informed deliberation.
A Review of Life Cycle Assessment Methods to Inform the Scale-Up of Carbon Dioxide Removal Interventions
05/11/2024
Isabela Butnar, John Lynch, Sylvia Vetter, Disni Gamaralalage, Yuzhou Tang, Jon McKechnie, Spyros Foteinis, Sue Rodway-Dyer, Mirjam Röder, Samuel Sogbesan, Astley Hastings, Phil Renforth, Matthew Brander, Jo House
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods are increasingly used for policy decision-making in the context of identifying and scaling up sustainable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) interventions. This article critically reviews CDR LCA case-studies through three key lenses relevant to policy decision-making on sustainable CDR scale-up, namely comparability across CDR assessments, assessment of the climatic merit of a CDR intervention, and consideration of wider CDR co-benefits and impacts. Our results show that while providing valuable life cycle understanding, current practices utilize diverse methods, usually attributional in nature, which are CDR and time-specific. As a result, they do not allow comprehensive cross-comparison between CDRs, nor reveal the potential consequences of scaling up CDRs in the future. We suggest CDR LCA design requires clearer definitions of the study scope and goal, the use of more consistent functional units, greater comprehensiveness in system boundaries, and explicit baseline definitions. This would allow for robust assessments, facilitating comparison with other CDR methods, and better evidencing net climate benefits. The inventory should collect time-dependent data on the full CDR life cycle and baseline, and report background assumptions. The impact assessment phase should evidence the climatic merits, co-benefits, and trade-offs potentially caused by the expanding CDR. Finally, to ensure a sustainable scale-up of CDR, consequential analyses should be performed, and interpretation involves the comparison of all selected metrics and the permanence of carbon storage against a baseline scenario.
Proposal to revise the EU Climate Law
17/10/2024
Kate Ervine, Martin Cames, Aaron Benjamin, Duncan McLaren, Ingrid Sundvor, Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, Wijnand Stoefs, Ulriikka Aarnio, Sofia Ghezzi, Julia Teppe, Alice Evatt, Mark Preston Aragones, Rodica Avornic, Wim Carton
The European Climate Law, as currently written, requires greenhouse gas emissions to be balanced with carbon dioxide removals by 2050. It explicitly mandates the EU institutions and the member states to “prioritise swift and predictable emissions reductions and, at the same time, enhance removals by natural sinks”. However, not only does the Climate Law not mention the different roles of biogenic sequestration by natural sinks and permanent removals, but it also fails to determine how much or which type of removals should be used to reach the net-zero target by 2050, or how much residual emissions will be allowed at that point. The EU must take advantage of this opportunity to revise the European Climate Law to ensure that carbon removals are supplementary to emissions reductions and to clarify the different roles of permanent removals and biogenic sequestration. Stakeholders representing academia, civil society and industry established the CO2ol Down project to co-create a proposal for a revision of the European Climate Law that would fulfil these aims.
