Broaden Research on Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement to Better Characterize Social Impacts

Abstract

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is being considered as a way of achieving large-scale removals of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research on the risks and benefits of different OAE approaches is expanding apace, but it remains difficult to anticipate and appraise the potential impacts to human communities that OAE might generate. These impacts, however, will be critical to evaluating the viability of specific OAE projects. This paper draws on the authors’ involvement in interdisciplinary assessment of OAE (1) to identify the factors that currently limit characterization of potential social impacts and (2) to propose ways of reconfiguring OAE research to better consider these.

Quantifying Regional Efficiency of Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) via Alkalinity Enhancement using the ECCO-Darwin Ocean Biogeochemistry State Estimate and an Idealized Vertical 1-D Model

“…While experiments and observations (Boyd et al, 2023) will be invaluable to inform these efforts, environmentally-and societally-responsible OAE perturbations (Fakhraee et al, 2022;Nawaz et al, 2023) should modify the natural ocean carbonate and ecological state (Ferderer et al, 2022) only slightly compared to its natural variability. Our work shows that the impacts of OAE are spatially dispersed across ocean basins before the full CO 2 potential is realized.…”

Social Considerations and Best Practices for Engaging Publics on Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement

“…Yet, inclusion in modelling might be warranted because such additions could result in localized reductions of dissolved CO 2 , negatively affecting phytoplankton and thus fisheries. Downstream, unanticipated negative findings linked to trace materials might be further modelled for their capacity to introduce health effects or to stigmatize waters important to a coastal community's tourism (Nawaz et al, 2023a). More broadly, all modelling could potentially benefit from citizen science engagement.…”

“…By engagement we mean any social science approach that explores public thinking, responses to, support or rejection of, and/or expectations as to what OAE is, what impacts it might have (positive or negative), or how OAE might better reflect or respond to social concerns. We also take the position that community engagement should be a part of all OAE and all ocean CDR projects (Nawaz et al, 2023a). In this sense, social research and engagement are synonymous terms.…”

Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Research

“…Marine CDR has the potential to reduce the need for land and freshwater resources. Large-scale marine CDR approaches, however, may struggle to achieve public acceptance (Bertram and Merk, 2020;Nawaz et al, 2023). Marine CDR options are receiving more and more interest, acknowledging that the ocean has already absorbed more than a quarter of the anthropogenic CO 2 emissions and would, on timescales of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, take up most of the remaining emissions (Archer and Brovkin, 2008), as it has done with natural high-CO 2 excursions in the Earth's geological past.…”

“…A possible advantage of most OAE methods is that, technologically, they appear relatively simple and rely, to a substantial degree, on technology that exists already for processing different mineral resources at annual rates similar to those that may be required by OAE by mid-century. A pos-sible roadblock for rapidly scaling up OAE may be a lack of public acceptance (Bertram and Merk, 2020;Nawaz et al, 2023).…”