Deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system, known collectively as climate ‘geoengineering’, have been proposed in order to moderate anthropogenic climate change. Although only one of many ways of framing the rationale for geoengineering the climate, the threat of ‘dangerous’ climate change beyond the ever closer 2°C warming boundary has contributed to a growing number of serious appraisals designed to evaluate their pros and cons and provide critical decision support. Our research has shown that these appraisals largely 1) do not consider the wider portfolio of options for tackling climate change, culminating in contextual isolation; 2) do not adequately respond to the post-normal scientific context in which climate change and geoengineering resides, by excluding diversities of knowledge; and 3) prematurely 'close down' upon certain geoengineering proposals, principally stratospheric aerosol injection, through the exertion of power via usually hidden instrumental framings.
Here we exhibit, for the first time, the findings of an 'upstream' participatory appraisal of geoengineering proposals alongside climate change mitigation options using a novel and innovative method called Deliberative Mapping. Through a combination of mixed-method interviews and deliberative workshops a diversity of specialists, stakeholders and members of the public participated in parallel and interconnected multi-criteria option appraisals. As the case is made for more reflexive and adaptive systems of governance the relative performance of different geoengineering proposals and climate change mitigation options is discussed to provide a 360° snapshot of the divergent perspectives and perceptions bearing upon contemporary climate change decision making.
