Right now, environmental and climate scientists across the world are racing to develop a plan to reverse the Earth’s warming climate.
Carbon removal — a process to slow (and even possibly reverse) climate change by capturing and storing carbon — is one of the techniques that experts consider “critical” to reaching the American goal of having net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
While many people across the globe suffer at the hand of global warming, addressing the issue isn’t simple. The process of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere isn’t just complex to implement: It will also deeply affect the lived experiences of families and communities where the industry exists. And it may be the social dimensions of carbon removal that are tougher to manage.
“I think for all of my time working in CDR, I felt like the social risks of deployment, the community dynamics, and host sites where we’re trying to employ these technologies has been an undervalued and underappreciated part of what’s going to what it’s going to take to scale this industry,” said Marcela Mulholland, deputy director of partnerships for the Carbon Removal Alliance, at an Arizona State University seminar discussing the social dimensions of CDR. “It feels like the world of social science research for CDR should be at least comparable to the kind of technical research that we see for these technologies. Too often, they’re siloed, and the people in the technical world don’t necessarily talk to or incorporate the findings from the social scientists into their work.”
The seminar — held on October 3 at the ASU Barrett & O’Connor Center in Washington, D.C. — was twofold, with researchers discussing what they’ve learned while studying the social dimensions of CDR while also questioning how future carbon removal processes can be more responsible to the communities it inhabits. Held blocks from the White House by the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at ASU, the group of experts and attendees were prompted to consider how considering the social dimensions of CDR could make a difference in its success.
Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology 