Periodic Reporting for period 3 - GENIE (GENIE: GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-05-01 bis 2025-10-31
In the UN Paris Agreement in 2015, more than 190 countries committed to hold global warming well below 2°C, and pursue limiting it even to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. More than half of the global emitters have announced targets to achieve a climate-neutral world by the middle of the century.
Yet, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. Climate change policy does not reflect the ambition of the Paris targets. However, it may already be too late to legislate ourselves out of climate change, and investment in sustainable energy sources is happening too slowly to put us on a pathway to climate neutrality.
Further, there are multiple indications that future climate impacts have been underestimated and could involve non-trivial “tipping points”. Given the risk of climate catastrophe, and that the required pace of energy transitions to reach the 2°C or 1.5°C targets are beyond historical experience, new unconventional solutions must be considered, and their implications carefully assessed.
Negative emissions options such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) will need to feature in net zero strategies by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and storing it safely in biological or geological sinks. Potential methods include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation, as well as direct air capture and CO2 utilisation among others.
There are three reasons why GGR needs to be considered a crucial complement of climate change mitigation: First, GGR will need to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions that are hard to avoid, in particular methane emissions from cows and other ruminating animals, nitrogen emissions from fertiliser use, or certain carbon emissions in the industrial sector. Without compensating GGR technologies, it is very unlikely that we can succeed in fully decarbonising human activity.
Second, GGR can help accelerate decarbonization, complementing climate policies that aim at structural changes of the current systems.
Finally, global net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere is important as a long-term risk-management option that may help revers some of climate impacts if we find out that we have surpassed critical climate thresholds.
More controversially, methods for increasing the Earth’s albedo, known as solar radiation management (SRM), have also been proposed as emergency options when global temperatures need to be temporarily limited. Prominent examples include cirrus cloud thinning, marine cloud brightening, and stratospheric aerosol injection.
The idea behind both GGR and SRM is that they could buy some time for the required transition process, e.g. by allowing for a temporary overshoot of the remaining carbon budget. This “carbon debt” can be paid back later via net negative emissions, i.e. a net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, deep uncertainties around the physical science basis in climate change and tipping points in the Earth system may require emergency climate engineering options that would work on shorter time scales than the decades involved in fully decarbonizing the world economy.
The GENIE (“GeoEngineering and Negative Emission Pathways in Europe”) project is set to close this research gap. Its vision is to provide an urgently needed, balanced, rigorous, and interdisciplinary understanding of GGR and geoengineering technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide an important assessment of technically feasible, politically acceptable and socially legitimate CO2 removal and climate engineering pathways that can be deployed in time and at scale.
Even though less frequently discussed and some being very controversial, it is a basic responsibility of science in the fight against climate change to consider all technologies and systematically explore the full solution space. This needs to include the opportunities and risks of the new technologies, some which might develop fast over the coming decade. The more we know about them now, the better policymakers can regulate them, or accelerate them, both nationally and globally.
Tackling climate change is a wicked policy problem that pervades in all areas of society. For this reason GENIE is deeply interdisciplinary and rooted in a meta-theoretical framework designed for the systematic exploration of the interrelated techno-economic, socio-technical and political-action systems that underpin the potential role of GGR and SRM in the fight against global warming.
GENIE will comprise of six substantive work packages (WPs) and two cross-cutting WPs: all are highly interconnected with interfaces for information exchange. By doing so GENIE aims to make at least three substantial scientific contributions:
• GENIE will develop comprehensive and consistent social science on CO2 removal and climate engineering in critical areas. This includes a new, granular theory and model for learning, diffusion and technology adoption and fill the void in research that systematically explores the role of public perception and preferences in shaping political actions.
• GENIE will consolidate and aggregate a rapidly expanding evidence base on CO2 removal and climate engineering using data science approaches to stay abreast of dynamic developments in research and technology development across the broad spectrum of options. It will use similar tools to comprehensively track the emerging landscape of coalitions and actors supporting different technologies across digital discourses in social media, newspapers or parliaments.
• GENIE will integrate social science into the systems engineering and economic modelling of transformation processes. A new model generation will feature a comprehensive, up-to-date technology description of the whole set of options, including social processes of technology development and adoption. Specific focus will be given to the social and distributional impacts of the options that may influence public perception and preferences for CO2 removal or climate engineering options.
Yet, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. Climate change policy does not reflect the ambition of the Paris targets. However, it may already be too late to legislate ourselves out of climate change, and investment in sustainable energy sources is happening too slowly to put us on a pathway to climate neutrality.
Further, there are multiple indications that future climate impacts have been underestimated and could involve non-trivial “tipping points”. Given the risk of climate catastrophe, and that the required pace of energy transitions to reach the 2°C or 1.5°C targets are beyond historical experience, new unconventional solutions must be considered, and their implications carefully assessed.
Negative emissions options such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) will need to feature in net zero strategies by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and storing it safely in biological or geological sinks. Potential methods include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation, as well as direct air capture and CO2 utilisation among others.
There are three reasons why GGR needs to be considered a crucial complement of climate change mitigation: First, GGR will need to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions that are hard to avoid, in particular methane emissions from cows and other ruminating animals, nitrogen emissions from fertiliser use, or certain carbon emissions in the industrial sector. Without compensating GGR technologies, it is very unlikely that we can succeed in fully decarbonising human activity.
Second, GGR can help accelerate decarbonization, complementing climate policies that aim at structural changes of the current systems.
Finally, global net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere is important as a long-term risk-management option that may help revers some of climate impacts if we find out that we have surpassed critical climate thresholds.
More controversially, methods for increasing the Earth’s albedo, known as solar radiation management (SRM), have also been proposed as emergency options when global temperatures need to be temporarily limited. Prominent examples include cirrus cloud thinning, marine cloud brightening, and stratospheric aerosol injection.
The idea behind both GGR and SRM is that they could buy some time for the required transition process, e.g. by allowing for a temporary overshoot of the remaining carbon budget. This “carbon debt” can be paid back later via net negative emissions, i.e. a net removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, deep uncertainties around the physical science basis in climate change and tipping points in the Earth system may require emergency climate engineering options that would work on shorter time scales than the decades involved in fully decarbonizing the world economy.
The GENIE (“GeoEngineering and Negative Emission Pathways in Europe”) project is set to close this research gap. Its vision is to provide an urgently needed, balanced, rigorous, and interdisciplinary understanding of GGR and geoengineering technologies. The ultimate goal is to provide an important assessment of technically feasible, politically acceptable and socially legitimate CO2 removal and climate engineering pathways that can be deployed in time and at scale.
Even though less frequently discussed and some being very controversial, it is a basic responsibility of science in the fight against climate change to consider all technologies and systematically explore the full solution space. This needs to include the opportunities and risks of the new technologies, some which might develop fast over the coming decade. The more we know about them now, the better policymakers can regulate them, or accelerate them, both nationally and globally.
Tackling climate change is a wicked policy problem that pervades in all areas of society. For this reason GENIE is deeply interdisciplinary and rooted in a meta-theoretical framework designed for the systematic exploration of the interrelated techno-economic, socio-technical and political-action systems that underpin the potential role of GGR and SRM in the fight against global warming.
GENIE will comprise of six substantive work packages (WPs) and two cross-cutting WPs: all are highly interconnected with interfaces for information exchange. By doing so GENIE aims to make at least three substantial scientific contributions:
• GENIE will develop comprehensive and consistent social science on CO2 removal and climate engineering in critical areas. This includes a new, granular theory and model for learning, diffusion and technology adoption and fill the void in research that systematically explores the role of public perception and preferences in shaping political actions.
• GENIE will consolidate and aggregate a rapidly expanding evidence base on CO2 removal and climate engineering using data science approaches to stay abreast of dynamic developments in research and technology development across the broad spectrum of options. It will use similar tools to comprehensively track the emerging landscape of coalitions and actors supporting different technologies across digital discourses in social media, newspapers or parliaments.
• GENIE will integrate social science into the systems engineering and economic modelling of transformation processes. A new model generation will feature a comprehensive, up-to-date technology description of the whole set of options, including social processes of technology development and adoption. Specific focus will be given to the social and distributional impacts of the options that may influence public perception and preferences for CO2 removal or climate engineering options.
The EU-funded GENIE (GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe) project explores the environmental, technical, social, legal, ethical and policy dimensions of greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management. GENIE aims to produce a comprehensive scientific assessment for evidence-based policymaking to address climate change, and to expand our toolkit for a zero-emissions future.
The GENIE project is lead by a team from Aarhus University in Denmark working in conjunction with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Germany, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the USA.
GENIE conducted mixed-methods research to examine public perceptions of SRM and CDR at a global level. This consisted of a broad survey exercise and a series of focus groups to explores the attitudes and concerns towards emerging climate change technologies in the Global South and the Global North, one of the very first such exercises of its kind and the first at such a scale. It is also unique in how it could deliver both quantitative insights from the surveys, which highlighted more broadly representative aspects of public perceptions, and qualitative insights from the focus groups, to give greater depth of understanding and nuance. The nationally representative surveys featured more than 30.000 respondents in 30 countries (and 19 languages), while there were also 44 focus groups in 22 countries (one urban, one rural in each), with more than 320 diverse participants involved. Drawing on the surveys, the Aarhus University researchers examined public perceptions of a diverse set of climate intervention technologies. A main finding is that publics in the Global South are generally more supportive of the cutting-edge methods to tackle climate change than their Global Northern counterparts. The study represents a significant advance in the mapping of attitudes towards the technologies that are currently receiving massive attention in the scientific community, setting a global baseline to orient ongoing discussions involving publics, experts, and policymakers. It stands out as the first piece of research to encompass respondents from all continents. Additionally, it is pioneering in its attempt to examine perceptions across the entire spectrum of methods, ranging from stratospheric aerosol injection to afforestation and direct air capture with storage. This vein of research has delivered a series of articles, three of which have been published in Nature Communications. To further facilitate broad engagement and investigation with this research, the full survey dataset has now been made available through the GENIE Knowledge Hub.
GENIE developed the methodology for Systematic Historical Analogue Research for Decision-making (SHARD), a new methodology for using historical case studies to inform low-carbon transitions. We published that as a paper in the first 2 years of the project. In this period, we applied the SHARD methodology in a series of papers on specific CDR technologies, including biochar, direct air capture, co2 pipelines and others in development. We built the Historical Adoption of Technologies (HATCH) dataset, which covers the adoption of hundreds of diverse technologies across hundreds of countries over time. The page has been viewed 4000 times and the data set downloaded 2000 times. We continue to expand it. We have published a set of papers using the HATCH data set, 2 of which comprise core chapters in a PhD student’s dissertation. It also forms the basis for PhD work at U. Oxford and U. of Geneva. We have partnered with our GENIE colleagues to publish a series of papers using HATCH data to inform the upscaling of CDR. We lead two editions of the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, including extensive outreach activities outlined below.
The GENIE project is lead by a team from Aarhus University in Denmark working in conjunction with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Germany, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the USA.
GENIE conducted mixed-methods research to examine public perceptions of SRM and CDR at a global level. This consisted of a broad survey exercise and a series of focus groups to explores the attitudes and concerns towards emerging climate change technologies in the Global South and the Global North, one of the very first such exercises of its kind and the first at such a scale. It is also unique in how it could deliver both quantitative insights from the surveys, which highlighted more broadly representative aspects of public perceptions, and qualitative insights from the focus groups, to give greater depth of understanding and nuance. The nationally representative surveys featured more than 30.000 respondents in 30 countries (and 19 languages), while there were also 44 focus groups in 22 countries (one urban, one rural in each), with more than 320 diverse participants involved. Drawing on the surveys, the Aarhus University researchers examined public perceptions of a diverse set of climate intervention technologies. A main finding is that publics in the Global South are generally more supportive of the cutting-edge methods to tackle climate change than their Global Northern counterparts. The study represents a significant advance in the mapping of attitudes towards the technologies that are currently receiving massive attention in the scientific community, setting a global baseline to orient ongoing discussions involving publics, experts, and policymakers. It stands out as the first piece of research to encompass respondents from all continents. Additionally, it is pioneering in its attempt to examine perceptions across the entire spectrum of methods, ranging from stratospheric aerosol injection to afforestation and direct air capture with storage. This vein of research has delivered a series of articles, three of which have been published in Nature Communications. To further facilitate broad engagement and investigation with this research, the full survey dataset has now been made available through the GENIE Knowledge Hub.
GENIE developed the methodology for Systematic Historical Analogue Research for Decision-making (SHARD), a new methodology for using historical case studies to inform low-carbon transitions. We published that as a paper in the first 2 years of the project. In this period, we applied the SHARD methodology in a series of papers on specific CDR technologies, including biochar, direct air capture, co2 pipelines and others in development. We built the Historical Adoption of Technologies (HATCH) dataset, which covers the adoption of hundreds of diverse technologies across hundreds of countries over time. The page has been viewed 4000 times and the data set downloaded 2000 times. We continue to expand it. We have published a set of papers using the HATCH data set, 2 of which comprise core chapters in a PhD student’s dissertation. It also forms the basis for PhD work at U. Oxford and U. of Geneva. We have partnered with our GENIE colleagues to publish a series of papers using HATCH data to inform the upscaling of CDR. We lead two editions of the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, including extensive outreach activities outlined below.
W are beyond the state of the art in terms of our meta-theoretical framework, and our reliance on a huge swathe of mixed-methods data so far. This includes:
• Expert elicitation exercise and opinion survey (N=74)
• Semi-structured expert research interviews (N=125)
• Site visits and naturalistic observation (N=8 so far, and growing, with supplemental research interviews onsite)
o July 2021: ice protection in Western Greenland on the Greenland Ice Sheet near Kangerlussuaq
o September 2021: the Climeworks Orca Direct Air Capture facility at Hellisheiði Iceland
o April 2022: The Drax BECCS facility near the Humber, England
o June 2022: afforestation, reforestation, and mangrove restoration in western Ecuador
o October 2022: the Carbon Engineering Direct Air Capture facility at Squamish Canada
o October 2022: marine cloud brightening, coral reef fogging and shading, enhanced weathering, biochar, and ecosystem adaptation and restoration in eastern (tropical) Australia
o March 2023: seagrass restoration and marine carbon removal in Wales (UK)
o March 2023: Running Tide, seaweed planting, kelp, blue carbon, carbon boys, ocean alkalinization, but also some coastal protection and beach nourishment in Maine, USA
• The survey (n=30,284 respondents, across 19 languages in 30 countries)
• Focus groups (N=323 respondents across 44 focus groups in 22 countries)
• Historical analogues and case studies across 10 technologies
• Systematic reviews and the State of CDR report
• Refined IAM modeling concerning DACCS and BECCS via IIASA and the Message-ix platform
In terms of tasks to the end of the project, we still have many, we have mapped out a remaining 20+ tasks across all 8 WPs which will take us until the end of the project.
• Expert elicitation exercise and opinion survey (N=74)
• Semi-structured expert research interviews (N=125)
• Site visits and naturalistic observation (N=8 so far, and growing, with supplemental research interviews onsite)
o July 2021: ice protection in Western Greenland on the Greenland Ice Sheet near Kangerlussuaq
o September 2021: the Climeworks Orca Direct Air Capture facility at Hellisheiði Iceland
o April 2022: The Drax BECCS facility near the Humber, England
o June 2022: afforestation, reforestation, and mangrove restoration in western Ecuador
o October 2022: the Carbon Engineering Direct Air Capture facility at Squamish Canada
o October 2022: marine cloud brightening, coral reef fogging and shading, enhanced weathering, biochar, and ecosystem adaptation and restoration in eastern (tropical) Australia
o March 2023: seagrass restoration and marine carbon removal in Wales (UK)
o March 2023: Running Tide, seaweed planting, kelp, blue carbon, carbon boys, ocean alkalinization, but also some coastal protection and beach nourishment in Maine, USA
• The survey (n=30,284 respondents, across 19 languages in 30 countries)
• Focus groups (N=323 respondents across 44 focus groups in 22 countries)
• Historical analogues and case studies across 10 technologies
• Systematic reviews and the State of CDR report
• Refined IAM modeling concerning DACCS and BECCS via IIASA and the Message-ix platform
In terms of tasks to the end of the project, we still have many, we have mapped out a remaining 20+ tasks across all 8 WPs which will take us until the end of the project.