Using decision pathway surveys to inform climate engineering policy choices

Abstract

Over the coming decades citizens living in North America and Europe will be asked about a variety of new technological and behavioral initiatives intended to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. A common approach to public input has been surveys whereby respondents’ attitudes about climate change are explained by individuals’ demographic background, values, and beliefs. In parallel, recent deliberative research seeks to more fully address the complex value tradeoffs linked to novel technologies and difficult ethical questions that characterize leading climate mitigation alternatives. New methods such as decision pathway surveys may offer important insights for policy makers by capturing much of the depth and reasoning of small-group deliberations while meeting standard survey goals including large-sample stakeholder engagement. Pathway surveys also can help participants to deepen their factual knowledge base and arrive at a more complete understanding of their own values as they apply to proposed policy alternatives. The pathway results indicate more fully the conditional and context-specific nature of support for several “upstream” climate interventions, including solar radiation management techniques and carbon dioxide removal technologies.

What risks matter? Public views about assisted migration and other climate-adaptive reforestation strategies

“…Decades of social science research on perceptions of environmental risks broadly identify the role of values-based factors (Capstick et al 2016;Ziegler 2017), including cultural norms or ethical positions (Kahan et al 2012;van der Linden 2015;Wildavsky and Dake 1990), and governance-related factors, such as trust in managing authorities (Siegrist et al 2006), as influencing perceptions of risk and levels of policy support. In the context of novel policy options where uncertainty is high, such as AM, individual decision-making processes may tend to default to Bpsychological biases^ (Gregory et al 2016), with values-based and trustrelated factors becoming particularly salient in shaping public responses.…”

“…Risk scholars working on environmental issues ranging from nanotechnology to fracking to geoengineering underscore the importance of engaging citizens early or at the emergence of an issue (e.g., Gregory et al 2016;Satterfield et al 2009;Thomas et al 2017) so as to better anticipate controversies, as well as address potential concerns. As government agencies responsible for resource management on public lands consider the widespread application of new climate-adaptive strategies for reforestation, current priority should be to better understand how citizens interpret this issue.…”

The Troubling Logic of Inclusivity in Environmental Consultations

“…Yet many inclusive environmental consultations are characterized by information asymmetries, where some parties-often intentionally-have access to better information than others (Akerlof 1970). If people are missing key facts or if some of the questions asked of them are neither cognitively nor emotionally tractable, then a conventional large-scale survey or voting procedure will produce meaningless results (Fischhoff 2005;Gregory, Satterfield, and Hasell 2016).…”

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

“…It is also clear that interventions in pursuit of just a few goals risk having negative effects on others and missing opportunities to realize synergies and manage trade‐offs (Palomo et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2018; Tallis et al., 2018). Examples abound: mitigating climate change via geoengineering could threaten other sustainability targets via unequal distribution of costs and international conflict (Gregory, Satterfield, & Hasell, 2016; Keith, 2000). Similarly, intensive food production poses risks to biodiversity (Beckmann et al., 2019), fuels nutrient run‐off that can trigger marine hypoxic zones and associated fisheries losses (Donner & Kucharik, 2008) and demands so much water that hydrological cycles and freshwater ecosystems can be undermined (Davis et al., 2015).…”