Fighting climate change requires an assessment of all options

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Fighting climate change requires an assessment of all options

Benjamin Sovacool, Aarhus University and Sussex University Keywan Riahi, International Institute on Applied Systems Analysis Jan Minx, Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) Gregory Nemet, University of Wisconsin

“We have very little time to achieve the goals set in the Paris Agreement, and climate impacts, such as increased heat, droughts, or flooding, occur more often and are more severe. Thus now is the time to expand the solution space and to assess all available options to transform the system and evaluate their risks.” - Keywan Riahi, International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis

In the UN Paris Agreement in 2015, more than 190 countries committed to hold global warming well below 2°C, and pursue limiting it even to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. More than half of the global emitters have announced targets to achieve a climate-neutral world by the middle of the century. Yet, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise (Friedlingstein et al., 2020). Climate change policy does not reflect the ambition of the Paris targets. However, it may already be too late to legislate ourselves out of climate change, and investment in sustainable energy sources is happening too slowly to put us on a pathway to climate neutrality. Further, there are multiple indications that future climate impacts have been underestimated and could involve nontrivial “tipping points” (Xu et al., 2018). Given the risk of climate catastrophe, and that the required pace of energy transitions to reach the 2°C or 1.5°C targets are beyond historical experience, new unconventional solutions must be considered, and their implications carefully assessed.

Unconventional climate engineering solutions

Negative emissions options such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) will need to feature in net zero strategies by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and storing it safely in biological or geological sinks. Potential methods include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation, as well as direct air capture and CO2 utilisation, among others (Smith et al., 2015; Minx et al., 2018; Griscom et al., 2018; Low and Schäfer, 2020; Hepburn et al., 2019). There are three reasons why GGR needs to be considered a crucial complement of climate change mitigation. First, GGR will need to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions that are hard to avoid, such as methane emissions from cows and other ruminating animals, nitrogen emissions from fertiliser use, or certain carbon emissions in the industrial sector. Without compensating GGR technologies, it is very unlikely that we can succeed in fully decarbonising human activity (Minx et al., 2018). Second, GGR can help accelerate decarbonisation, complementing climate policies that aim at structural changes of the current systems. Finally, global net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere is important as a long-term riskmanagement option that may help reverse some of the climate impacts if we find out that we have surpassed critical climate thresholds. (Minx et al., 2018). The idea behind both GGR and SRM is that they could buy some time for the required transition process, e.g. by allowing for a temporary overshoot of the remaining carbon budget. This “carbon debt” can be paid back later via net negative emissions, i.e. a net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere (Minx et al., 2018). More controversially, methods for increasing the Earth’s albedo, known as solar radiation management (SRM), have also been proposed as emergency options when global temperatures need to be temporarily limited (National Research Council, 2015a and 2015b). Prominent examples include cirrus cloud thinning, marine cloud brightening, and stratospheric aerosol injection (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021). Nevertheless, deep uncertainties around the physical science basis in climate change and tipping points in the Earth system may require emergency climate engineering options that would work on shorter time scales than the decades involved in fully decarbonising the world economy (IPCC, 2014; Lenton et al., 2008; Kriegler et al., 2009). Despite their importance, most research on GGR and SRM remains technical rather than social (Minx et al., 2017). Existing GGR and SRM options are changing rapidly in terms of their technical design, cost, performance, scalability, and deployment potential. SRM technologies are at an early stage of development—current knowledge is mainly derived from atmospheric modelling studies (Kravitz et al., 2017; Irvine et al., 2017). The role of SRM in climate change mitigation portfolios is still poorly understood (Tavoni et al., 2017), and its effects on temperature, precipitation, and ecosystems, especially at the sub-global level, remain difficult to assess (Kravitz and MacMartin, 2020). Even though the need for research on broader sustainability implications of GGR and SRM have been iterated in the literature (Fuss et al., 2016), this research gap is still wide open.

The GENIE project

The GENIE (“GeoEngineering and Negative Emission Pathways in Europe”) project is set to close this research gap. Its vision is to provide an urgently needed, balanced, rigorous, and interdisciplinary understanding of GGR and geoengineering technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide a critical assessment of technically feasible, politically acceptable and socially legitimate CO2 removal and climate engineering pathways that can be deployed in time and at scale. Even though less frequently discussed and some being very controversial, it is a basic responsibility of science in the fight against climate change to consider all technologies and systematically explore the full solution space. This needs to include the opportunities and risks of the new technologies, some of which might develop fast over the coming decade. The more we know about them now, the better policymakers can regulate them or accelerate them nationally and globally. Tackling climate change is a wicked policy problem (Pielke, 2007) that pervades in all areas of society. For this reason, GENIE is deeply interdisciplinary and rooted in a meta-theoretical framework designed to systematically explore the interrelated techno-economic, socio-technical and political-action systems that underpin the potential role of GGR and SRM in the fight against global warming.

Structure and scientific contributions

GENIE will comprise of six substantive work packages (WPs) and two crosscutting WPs (Figure 1)—all are highly interconnected with interfaces for information exchange. By doing so, GENIE aims to make at least three substantial scientific contributions:

• GENIE will develop comprehensive and consistent social science on CO2 removal and climate engineering in critical areas. This includes a new, granular theory and model for learning, diffusion and technology adoption and fills the void in research that systematically explores the role of public perception and preferences in shaping political actions.

• GENIE will consolidate and aggregate a rapidly expanding evidence base on CO2 removal and climate engineering using data science approaches to stay abreast of dynamic developments in research and technology development across the broad spectrum of options. Further, it/we will use big data approaches to comprehensively track the emerging landscape of coalitions and actors supporting different technologies across digital discourses in social media, newspapers or parliaments.

• GENIE will integrate social science into the systems engineering and economic modelling of transformation processes. A new model generation will feature a comprehensive, upto-date technology description of the whole set of options, including social processes of technology development and adoption. Specific focus will be given to the social and distributional impacts of the options that may influence public perception and preferences for CO2 removal or climate engineering options.

Theory of change

The GENIE project is explicitly designed to make a strong contribution to not only climate and energy research but also national policy, European policy, and social impact. Figure 3 shows the impact pathway—or theory of change—for GENIE, setting out how project activities will contribute to achieving expected project impacts. Table 1 provides further detail, such as how the impact of project activities will be measured.

Projected outcomes

• Establish a knowledge hub: a resource for GGR and SRM related information with open access to the GENIE outputs and three main types of tools: (i) scenario portals; (ii) technology databases; and (iii) infographics and interactive maps.

• Contribute to major international scientific assessments: including the IPCC, the Stanford Energy Modelling Forum or the Sustainable Development Goals debate.

• Contribute to national and European policy: by providing a better understanding of the dynamics, interaction and costs of energy and climate policies, by leveraging on the insights emerging from the analysis of different climate pathways, their synergies, and their tradeoffs, as well as the social acceptability of such dimensions.

• Impact ethics and public acceptability of geoengineering and NETs: by informing citizens about the diverse benefits and risks of GGR and SRM, as well as the policy actions that can mitigate their downsides.

The road ahead

GENIE is set to commence in May 2021, with the first results expected to be published in 2023. It is scheduled to run for six years and has been funded by an ERC Synergy Grant. Co-led by three leading European researchers, further collaborations are anticipated in the future.

PROJECT SUMMARY

The EU-funded GENIE project will explore the environmental, technical, social, legal, ethical and policy dimensions of greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management. GENIE aims to produce a comprehensive scientific assessment for evidence-based policymaking to address climate change, and to expand our toolkit for a zero-emissions future.

PROJECT TEAM

World leading researchers will integrate insights from social science, engineering and physical science disciplines to provide a comprehensive view of geoengineering, and how they can help with the transition to climate neutrality in Europe and the world. All partners are also leading authors in the current production of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).