Rob Bellamy Profile picture
Climate change, technology and society. Lecturer @GeographyUOM. Associate Fellow @InSIS. Fellow @RGS_IBG. Co-I @CO2REhub. Co-I Co-CREATE

Jan 24, 2023, 11 tweets

A short🧵on our public perceptions chapter in last week's #StateofCDR report... 1/n

Download the full report here: stateofcdr.org

There are 3 broad lines of evidence for gauging perceptions: sampling large groups of people (e.g. surveys or experiments); individuals or small groups (e.g. interviews or deliberation); and big-data analysis of social media (e.g. sentiment analysis or stance detection) 2/n

In our chapter, we undertake a synthesis of the main insights from the English-language peer-reviewed scientific literature on public perception and an analysis of Twitter activity on the topic over time 3/n

Evidence in the scientific literature on how people perceive CDR is growing but still small. This figure shows the number of research papers on public perception of CDR by year and CDR method 4/n

Our review found large regional disparities in the peer-reviewed research on public perceptions of CDR. Only ten of the papers reviewed researched public views outside of Western Europe and North America 5/n

The scientific literature on public perceptions consistently finds low levels of awareness and knowledge of CDR in the populations of the countries studied 6/n

Research shows that people’s reactions to CDR are tied to their values, beliefs and sense of identity. Factors include trust in the actors involved, beliefs about tampering with nature, and perceived trade-offs against other approaches for tackling climate change 7/n

Attention to CDR on Twitter has proliferated in recent years, growing faster than attention to climate change in general 8/

Here’s a breakdown on the number of tweets per year on general CDR and method-specific CDR (panel A) and the relative shares of overall CDR tweets by method (panel B) 9/

Sentiments in tweets are generally positive (except for ocean fertilisation), and the trend in sentiment is positive (except for BECCS) 10/n

Future needs: Engaging the public with CDR requires policymakers and investors to understand the nuances of how different methods are perceived, extending beyond English-language scientific literature 11/11

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