Failure to communicate
When Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft, mayor of Alameda, California, scrolled through The New York Times on a Saturday morning in April 2024, a story about a controversial experiment caught her eye. Researchers from Washington state were trialing a machine that looked like a big snow cannon, which they hoped could one day be used to brighten clouds to reflect more of the Sun’s rays. They’d been spraying tiny salt particles into the air over the San Francisco Bay.
At first, Ashcraft wondered which neighboring town was hosting the test. But as she read, she was shocked to learn that the researchers were conducting their experiment right there in Alameda.
Ashcraft texted her acting city manager, who was equally surprised. The story revealed that the researchers had kept the test a secret to limit protests. “It wasn’t just an oversight that they forgot to tell the city,” Ashcraft says. “They chose not to.” Concerned about the safety of the test, city staff investigated. Though a report concluded it was harmless, the council eventually voted to ban it, discomfited by the researchers’ lack of transparency.
Ashcraft hoped this would be a “teachable moment” for the research team. “Maybe they were just in such a hurry, or maybe they thought they could get by without being noticed,” she says. “Whatever it was, it didn’t work well for them. It really backfired.”
The technology being trialed in Alameda was one of a suite of new geoengineering tools—many still in the earliest stages of development—that aim to modify the atmosphere or the ocean in order to fight climate change. Some of these tools are designed to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, a step that, along with drastic emissions cuts, scientists agree will be essential for limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Others—such as cloud brightening—don’t counter the drivers of climate change, but aim to limit warming, protecting vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs.
One thing these technologies have in common, however, is that they’re at risk of being stopped before they can even be tested in the field. Researchers’ ability to conduct even the most basic field tests depends on the goodwill of nearby communities, but critics charge that many project leaders treat public engagement as a check-box exercise—or forgo it entirely. In the past 3 years, public outcry has thwarted several climate engineering projects.
Others, however, have built enough trust to proceed. Their success has taught some key lessons—as has a flurry of studies by social scientists. These researchers have explored the kinds of concerns people hold about climate engineering, how to have productive public discussions about it, and even where to run experiments. Yet their findings are rarely incorporated into the groundwork for field tests.
“It’s really, really hard to be taken seriously,” says social scientist Sikina Jinnah of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “There’s a handful of scientists who I think bend over backwards to support social science and to advocate for the inclusion of social scientists and their perspectives, but they’re few and far between.”
Geoengineering—deliberately altering the workings of the planet—sounds ambitious, even arrogant. Perhaps inevitably it invites concerns about meddling with nature, and poses tricky questions about who decides when and where the technologies should be deployed.
It comes in two main flavors (see graphic, below). Solar radiation modification describes techniques for deflecting the Sun’s rays, from painting buildings white, to brightening clouds, to injecting tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere. The international shipping fleet has been inadvertently geoengineering the planet for decades with emissions from ships’ stacks: When new shipping regulations restricted sulfur dioxide emissions in 2020, the resulting rise in sea-surface temperatures suggested the pollution had been brightening clouds above the sea.
Carbon removal, on the other hand, describes ways to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, from low-tech strategies such as planting trees and restoring wetlands to new methods such as changing the chemistry of the ocean to absorb more CO2 or vacuuming the gas out of the air with giant filters. Currently, carbon-removal efforts soak up about 2 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, mostly through the planting of new forests. That amount would likely need to quadruple by 2050 in order to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to a 2024 report from the University of Oxford, requiring the rapid scale-up of new carbon-removal methods. “It’s got to go from something that most people have never heard of to the biggest industry the world has ever seen in a really short time,” says climate scientist David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Solar radiation modification
Researchers have proposed various methods to curb the effects of climate change by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.
Stratospheric aerosol injection
Balloons or aircraft would release tiny sulfur dioxide or calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere to reflect solar radiation.
Marine cloud brightening
Ships would spray a fog of sea salt particles into low-lying clouds to brighten them, causing them to reflect more sunlight.
Marine carbon dioxide removal
Technologies that boost the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (gray arrows) by changing the chemistry of the ocean could help limit global warming.
Ocean fertilization
Adding iron sulfate or other nutrients would produce blooms of phytoplankton, which would absorb carbon dioxide and take it to the ocean floor when they die.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement
Alkaline minerals would be released from ships or outflow pipes, or spread along the beach to dissolve in the water, enhancing alkalinity and increasing carbon dioxide uptake.
Because carbon-removal technologies are so new and unfamiliar, public perceptions of them have not yet hardened. But many worry researchers are squandering the opportunity this presents. When it comes to ocean-based carbon removal, for instance, “I just feel like we’re at a really vulnerable stage from a public perception standpoint,” says Sara Nawaz, who directs research at American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal Law and Policy. “I think that there’s totally the risk that one or several projects that get really stigmatized can just delay things or even just totally kind of take it off the table.”
Forgoing public engagement has already had fatal consequences for solar geoengineering projects—with ramifications for the entire field.
In 2021, the Harvard University–backed Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) project was planning to launch a balloon in Sweden to study stratospheric aerosol injection, the theory that releasing tiny particles of calcium carbonate or sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere will reflect enough sunlight to temporarily cool the planet. The balloon flight would simply test whether SCoPEx’s equipment worked as intended, not release particles.
In the lead-up to the test flight, SCoPEx’s advisory committee debated the need for public engagement. Some members argued the test flight bore little difference to atmospheric research routinely carried out without public consultation, whereas others advocated for transparency and dialogue. In the end, the committee ruled that public outreach wasn’t necessary.
But, as with the Alameda project, the intention of the research was more important to people than what was actually taking place, and after objections from the Saami Council, a local Indigenous group, as well as local and international campaigners, the flight was halted. “These experiments and these technologies have much deeper meaning than just whether or not there’s particles in the air,” says Jinnah, who co-authored a paper describing SCoPEx’s governance challenges and joined the advisory committee following the launch cancellation.
A turbulent history
Scientists have suggested using geoengineering to combat climate change since the late 20th century. Solar radiation modification () includes proposals to reflect sunlight away from Earth, whereas marine carbon dioxide removal () includes technologies for changing the chemistry of the ocean to speed up its absorption of carbon. Field trials of the technologies have accelerated in the past 5 years, but public perception remains fraught and many projects have foundered.
The debates continued as the team planned its next moves. Should the researchers only engage with the community at the launch site, or with the global public, which stood to benefit from planetary cooling? And should engagement simply involve informing people, or should it be a process of building relationships with communities and incorporating their concerns into research? Most guidelines for public engagement assume a project will continue for a significant length of time. SCoPEx wanted to launch a balloon and leave.
The advisory committee could not agree on a plan, and the project leaders ultimately decided to pull the plug in 2024. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, SCoPEx co-leader David Keith said the project’s prominent failure would make this branch of research more difficult.
Climate engineering can be even more unsettling to the public than other controversial technologies such as genetic engineering. It involves tinkering with complex natural systems—the sea, the sky—which largely renders it irreversible: It isn’t possible to retrieve sulfur dioxide particles from the stratosphere or grains of CO2-absorbing mineral sand from the seabed. And exactly how the technologies will be deployed and regulated is unclear.
“You’re not just asking people, what do they think of this technology or this field trial or this sort of machinery or activity,” Nawaz says. “You’re asking people to contemplate different potential futures that could arise. So you’re asking them to think through, what do you want the world to look like?”
Such outreach often meets with skepticism. In a study led by Livia Fritz, a social scientist at Aarhus University, hundreds of people across 22 countries in the Global North and Global South spoke in focus groups about how they believed geoengineering projects should be discussed. Most expressed disillusionment with engagement—not because they didn’t want to be consulted, but because they had experienced bad-faith consultations in the past that sought to convince rather than to listen.
Some participants didn’t believe the public should be involved in decision-making, citing concerns about people being manipulated by misinformation, then making consequential decisions, Fritz says. “Brexit, for example, was mentioned a lot here.” She says the results point to the need for open consultation on climate engineering that isn’t limited to issuing or denying permission for particular projects, but that allows people to consider and debate the technologies more broadly.
Solar radiation modification research rouses other suspicions: Studies have found a strong overlap between online discussion of the technology and long-standing conspiracy theories, such as the idea that condensation trails from airplanes are in fact chemicals released for an unknown but nefarious purpose. These conspiracy theories and other misunderstandings are partly behind moves to ban or restrict solar geoengineering: There are bills passing through the legislature in 28 U.S. states to limit research or deployment of the technology, most of which were introduced this year.
Yet engagement offers one form of inoculation against the spread of misinformation, according to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report from 2017. Transparent communication builds trust, the report concludes, such as when scientists disclose funding sources or potential conflicts of interest or demonstrate a willingness to listen to public concerns.
Jinnah says some scientists believe engagement isn’t necessary because they feel the importance of the research should override public concerns, and because some people will be opposed to it no matter what outreach takes place. But engagement can lead to greater flexibility in people’s viewpoints by defusing tensions and resolving objections, says Rob Bellamy, a social scientist at the University of Manchester. “People often display something that’s called reluctant acceptance,” he says. “They’re actually quite happy for you to go ahead and do your experiments because they recognize through the deliberative process that … we’re at a point now where we need to start considering these more controversial ideas.”
Researchers, too, may learn something by listening: Local people know their area better than anyone, and might raise potential complications that aren’t even on scientists’ radars. Cardiff University social scientist Emily Cox says research on carbon removal in the United Kingdom consistently finds that no one is entirely opposed to it. Rather, people want to know whether the large arrays of energy-hungry machines might create competition for electric power, or increase housing pressures by occupying much-needed land.
“Not all technologies that are developed should go on to be deployed,” Bellamy says. “I’m certain there will be some technologies that won’t go on to be deployed for very good reasons. And public participation helps us feed into those decisions.”
The attempts so far have also taught some lessons about public engagement, including a sobering one: Success isn’t guaranteed. Social license can be lost overnight, as Planetary Technologies learned on 1 March 2023, when it presented its research plan to people in the coastal town of Hayle, near the western tip of Cornwall in England.
Planetary was preparing to conduct a trial of ocean-alkalinity enhancement—a nascent carbon-removal method that entails changing the pH of seawater to accelerate CO2 uptake from the atmosphere. After a long search for a test site, the Canadian startup had landed on St. Ives Bay, where it was to partner with a local utility company to add magnesium hydroxide to an outflow pipe. The chemicals would be discharged into the bay, where they would be stirred up by Atlantic Ocean currents.
The meeting was at capacity. CEO Mike Kelland asked whether anyone was worried about the climate crisis. The room bristled. Cornwall is known for its environmentalism; it’s part of the region’s identity.
When a member of the public asked what would happen if something went wrong, Kelland said Planetary would go out of business. It seemed to more than one attendee that he hadn’t considered what might happen to the bay. They were concerned by what they saw as attempts to downplay the chemical the company was using by describing it as “an antacid for the sea.”
The meeting was “dreadful,” says Sue Sayer, a researcher who studies the seal colony in the bay and directs the nonprofit Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust. “They did 20 minutes for discussion, and then it was pasties and wine. And everyone refused to leave for pasties and wine and said, ‘We’re not leaving until you answer all our questions.’”
Within the month, St. Ives town councilor Senara Wilson Hodges had launched a protest movement, Keep Our Sea Chemical Free. “It was just feeling like something’s being done to you with zero consultation,” she says.
Kelland had obtained an environmental safety review. He’d been meeting stakeholders all over the region. Even the mayor of Hayle was in support. What he was missing was an understanding of the region’s history and identity. In Cornwall, people have a reason to be skeptical of the use of chemicals in the sea. In 1967, a tanker foundering on the coast caused one of the world’s largest oil spills, and in recent years beaches have been polluted by sewage discharged by the same utility company that was to be Planetary’s partner. “I think a lot of it is doing your homework in advance and understanding what you’re getting yourself into, which I don’t think we did very well in that location,” Kelland says.
Planetary’s work in Cornwall never resumed; the trial planned in 2023 remains on hold.
The Cornwall project demonstrates that large-scale projects will only succeed if they’re a good match for the local culture, social scientists say. “It’s not all about engagement,” Cox says. “It’s also about place-technology fit. You’ve got to do the right thing in the right place, and you’ve got to understand the culture and history of the local area, and then work with that.”
Fritz and others have found that people from the Global South are generally more open to solar geoengineering than those in the Global North, perhaps because they are presently bearing the brunt of climate impacts. Global South participants in Fritz’s research were more likely to have experienced a major natural disaster in the past 3 years and to expect that climate change would harm them personally. Younger and more vulnerable groups, who likewise stand to be more affected by climate change, also tend to be more supportive of climate interventions.
At the same time, at least in the United States, people in more deprived areas may be more skeptical of untested technologies, as they are often still facing the consequences of prior industrial pollution. These regions—which often have existing infrastructure and an underemployed workforce—are good candidates for running operations once the technology has become more established, a 2023 document from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concludes, whereas areas with higher socioeconomic status may be better suited for collaborating on early trials.
Who’s in charge can also make a big difference. In a collaboration with Cox, Bellamy has found that people were more likely to say they’d oppose a hypothetical ocean alkalinity enhancement project if told it will be run by companies funded by private investment—but they’re much more open to the technology when they’re told it will be operated by local cooperatives. “The specifics matter,” Nawaz says. “The specifics not only of the technology that you’re talking about, but also what exactly that looks like in practice in a given ecosystem or geographic context.”
Some projects have succeeded in finding the right fit. Planetary has received much more public support for field tests in its home of Halifax, Canada, than it did in Cornwall. The company has a trusted collaborator in Dalhousie, the local university, and its approach to public engagement has evolved. “We move at the speed of trust,” says Diana Philip, a community-engagement practitioner who joined Planetary in September 2024. Now, she says, the company’s first step is to try to understand a community and its needs. “We have to move from just informing to, ‘How do we collaborate? How can this be more beneficial to you?’”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., a startup called Vesta was able to run its first field trial on New York state’s Long Island after the local community invited the company to come and pitch the experiment to them. Vesta aims to boost marine carbon removal by spreading highly alkaline sand made of olivine, a greenish rock, in the tidal zone, where waves will erode it, releasing its alkalinity. Residents of the small community bordering what is arguably the world’s first geoengineered beach are enthusiastic about their role in testing a potential climate solution.
Despite the missteps in Alameda and Sweden, there is one place where solar geoengineering has broad public support. For the past 5 years, oceanographer Daniel Harrison of Southern Cross University has been leading a cloud brightening project off the northeastern coast of Australia—without local or international protest.
On a ship over the Great Barrier Reef, the scientists have been spraying a fine plume of saltwater particles into the sky, on and off, since 2020. When the tiny particles reach existing clouds, they attract water vapor and swell to 500,000 times their size, forming visible droplets.
The project aims to find out whether the salt particles will increase the clouds’ reflectivity, bouncing more sunlight back into space before it hits the water. If it succeeds, the technology might cool the ocean enough to prevent the death of the Great Barrier Reef.
This is a big operation. Below decks are three shipping containers’ worth of machinery to suck up seawater and generate saltwater spray. A second ship carries a lab that measures the size and distribution of the salt particles, while an aircraft, nicknamed Bruce, samples clouds to measure the particles that reach them. A drone takes on the role of a weather balloon, as these are banned in this highly regulated patch of ocean: Balloons burst, fall to the surface, and become ocean-borne waste.
The Great Barrier Reef is traditionally owned by more than 70 Indigenous groups, and the researchers obtained permission from every group whose sea country overlapped with their proposed testing area. “We have a self-imposed rule,” Harrison says. “We don’t do any research on sea country without the express prior permission of traditional owners. We’ve never been refused for cloud brightening, but if we were, we’d have to go do it somewhere else.”
The marine cloud brightening project also ran 1 year’s worth of community engagement panels in Townsville, a nearby city, and invited the public to share ideas and concerns. “What we strive towards is codesigned research,” Harrison says. “So it’s not as simple as just going and asking them for permission. We ask for their input, we ask for their opinions, we invite them to be part of the process.”
People identified risks that Harrison and his team hadn’t considered. Would salt be carried over the crop fields of northeastern Queensland? Would it rust all the cars in Townsville? The researchers investigated, and learned that the amount of salt they produced was minuscule compared with the quantity that naturally blows in from the sea.
In 2024, an independent survey of the project found a majority of people Australia-wide support it, a view Harrison attributes to the project’s clear purpose and limited scope. “We’re not just doing science for the sake of doing science. We’re doing science to try and find solutions for the reef.”
By winning over the public, Harrison’s effort has become the first solar geoengineering project to stage a real world test, 3 decades after cloud brightening was proposed. “We’re the first ones to ever go and test anything outside,” he says.
Though research points the way, scientists agree there’s no recipe book for climate-tech engagement that can be used for each new project. But some structural changes would make the process a whole lot easier, social scientists say. “We tend to say, ‘There’s a project here, let’s go and talk to people about what they want,’” Nawaz says. “The project level is a deeply flawed way to do engagement. We need to be thinking about what the impacts are at scale.”
Instead of communities being consulted over and over again for different climate engineering projects, Nawaz proposes that an independent authority could oversee a single consultation across an entire region, to get a bird’s-eye picture of the area’s history, culture, ecosystems, and resources, and figure out—with public input—the types of projects that would best suit the area. Geoengineering tests could be combined with the development of other climate-related infrastructure, such as the additional renewable energy sources that will be required by some technologies.
One thing is clear: Effective technology and good intentions will never be enough to get climate engineering off the ground. “There’s no point having a technological solution if you don’t have the social license to use it,” Harrison says. “If the community and the public don’t support this, then it’s never going to happen.”
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