Co-producing Knowledge about Community-specific Views to Albedo Modification in the Arctic

Given the slow progress of decarbonizing energy systems, climate intervention has been suggested as an emerging technology to buy time for mitigation actions to come into effect. Some scientists have modeled modifying the albedo to reflect incoming sunlight as a climate intervention. This could cool the planet globally, or regionally in the Arctic, bringing risks, possible benefits, and political complexity. Different designs of climate intervention can produce different climatic results and hence have different impacts on communities. This is one of many reasons why the co-production of knowledge about them is crucial. Having local people evaluate potential impacts to their communities, in terms of their own priorities and concerns, generates knowledge about how geoengineering can affect vulnerability and resilience to climate change on community and regional scales. This paper presents an example of a project which incorporates citizen ideas, concerns, and questions early into the research of albedo modification in the Arctic, with the rationale that “upstream public engagement” is better for science and society. For this purpose, we conducted semi-structured interviews, public lectures and focus groups in Finnish Lapland, by and above the Arctic Circle, about climate intervention, and are conducting climate modeling work based upon this qualitative work to examine scenarios of winter duration and conditions under climate change and climate engineering. While stakeholder participants were generally interested in learning about and discussing the implications of albedo modification strategies in the Arctic, they also were interested in placing these strategies in a broader frame of climate solutions and wider range of geographical scales, with interest in research on issues like consumer lifestyle changes, re-localization, renewable energy research, and the lack of political will to mitigate emissions, which was seen as a potential risk following from the development and availability of climate intervention methods in the future. In the paper, we discuss the tension between different boundings of the problem under investigation in projects of knowledge co-production, and how to use that tension productively.