Unveiling assumptions through interdisciplinary scrutiny: Observations from the German Priority Program on Climate Engineering (SPP 1689)

Abstract

The interdisciplinary exchange in climate engineering research offers a unique opportunity to make assumptions more explicit for such research projects. While making assumptions explicit is the standard in all disciplinary sciences, some assumptions in the context of societal challenges can only be usefully unveiled, discussed, and verified from the perspective of other research disciplines. Results from successful interdisciplinary collaborations are then more accessible and more generalizable to actors beyond the confines of the academic community. We aim to illustrate how interdisciplinary exchange helps to unveil assumptions in research endeavors and why this is important for successful interdisciplinary collaborations. We therefore follow different stages of the German Priority Program on Climate Engineering (SPP 1689), which we use as an example case of a successful interdisciplinary project. SPP 1689 focused on risks, challenges, and opportunities of Climate Engineering from the perspectives of numerous disciplines. Major results were that the initial assessments of technologies had to be sobered, the consideration of trade-offs is crucial for the potential assessment, and governance issues appeared larger than previously considered. From the reflections of SPP 1689, we conclude with three lessons learned: (1) The project profited from egalitarian organizational structures and communicative practices, preventing the predominance from single disciplines. (2) Within the project continuous efforts were undertaken to foster interdisciplinary understanding. In addition, the flexible project structure allowed for the accommodation of research needs arising as a result of these exchanges. (3) SPP 1689 offered early career researchers a platform for professional exchange on common challenges and best practices of being a part of an interdisciplinary research project.

The politics and governance of research into solar geoengineering

“…Dilling and Hauser (2013) suggest that a research governance framework must respond to three sets of issues: “the direct physical risks of the research; the transparency and responsibility in decision‐making for the research; and the larger societal meanings of the research” (p. 553). Such breadth would be facilitated by inter‐ and trans‐disciplinary research, which could encourage reflexivity, helping reveal inappropriate presumptions and framings (Kreuter et al, 2020), deter solutionism (Asayama et al, 2019), and generate more socially relevant knowledge (Sugiyama, Asayama, Kosugi, et al, 2017).…”

Deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies at the National Level: A Need for Holistic Feasibility Assessments

“…Combining multiple dimensions in the assessment can highlight temporal, spatial, and technological aspects enabling or hindering the scale-up potential of a technology (Minx et al, 2018;Forster et al, 2020). Assessments of NETs have been criticized for being too narrow in their evaluation of what enabling conditions need to be met, with most focusing on geophysical, technological, and economic aspects Mengis et al, 2019;Kreuter et al, 2020;Waller et al, 2020).…”

Climate Imagineering

“…Examples, rather, are of more institutionalised practices, including social scientists embedded amongst their objects of study (e.g. Oomen, 2019, with the Harvard Geoengineering Research Program), codes of conduct for guiding research (e.g the pioneering 'Oxford Principles' of Rayner et al, 2013), or interdisciplinary programmes (the German Priority Programme on Climate Engineering of Kreuter et al, 2020).…”

“…Moreover, the need to set and achieve common objectives can facilitate constructive critique. The aforementioned German Priority Programme designed several internal retreats that allowed their researchers to exchange views on each others' disciplinary and personal assumptions, and in turn informed the design of joint projects (Kreuter et al, 2020). Even if such programs cannot often be created from scratch, disciplinarily-grounded networks and consortia -for example, modeling inter-comparison projects -can benefit from regular exchange with stakeholder and other disciplines to have their assumptions, approaches, and framings questioned (Saltelli et al, 2020).…”