The North–South Divide on Public Perceptions of Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering?: A Survey in Six Asia-Pacific Countries

ABSTRACT

Solar radiation management (SRM) is a controversial technological proposal to deliberately cool the Earth for addressing climate change. Because of great concerns over global consequences of SRM deployment, an inclusive and global conversation is considered necessary for the governance of SRM. However, public perception research on SRM to date has been mostly limited to the Global North or Western democracy. Because social acceptability is crucial for SRM governance, such research must also encompass the Global South or Eastern perspectives beyond the Western bias. The present study conducted an online survey of college students in six Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, China, India, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea) about their attitudes toward stratospheric aerosol geoengineering, one of most discussed SRM proposals. Our results showed that students from the Global South (China, India, the Philippines) were more willing to accept geoengineering as a potential option than those from the Global North (Australia, Japan, and South Korea). We also found an overwhelming consensus in support of geoengineering governance principles such as information disclosure and pre-deployment regulation across all six countries. Our results suggest that more nuanced and granular understandings of non-Western perspectives are critical to enable inclusive democratic debate on geoengineering governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Public perception
• public engagement
• solar geoengineering
• climate engineering
• solar radiation management

Acknowledgments

We thank Atsushi Ishii, Pak-Hang Wong, Joshua Horton and Andy Parker for their comments on our survey design.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our preliminary results have been reported in Sugiyama, Kosugi, Ishii, and Asayama (2016).

2 The Oxford principles are: (1) “Geoengineering to be regulated as a public good,” (2) “Public participation in geoengineering decision-making,” (3) “Disclosure of geoengineering research and open publication of results,” (4) “Independent assessment of impacts,” and (5) “Governance before deployment” (Rayner et al., 2013).

3 Section 7 of the ESM presents a sensitivity analysis on the choice of base country for the country dummy variable. Though the results vary with the base country, the overall results are fairly robust.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society (RISTEX) as part of the Future Earth project.