Emerging policy perspectives on geoengineering: An international comparison

Geoengineering evokes fears and hopes among the general public, media and scientists. Policy-makers thus face the dilemma of how to respond to this deeply controversial issue. In this paper we examine a wide variety of policy documents from different countries, international organizations and NGOs to gain insights into how geoengineering is perceived at the policy level. We use qualitative content analysis in order to determine specific aspects of framing of geoengineering: concerns and hopes to indicate risk perceptions and action proposals to account for directions in policy development. The policy documents contain a large variety of concerns, hopes and action proposals. Technical and risk-related issues dominate the concerns; the hopes express a wish for new solutions to climate change; and the action proposals emphasize the need for more research. Furthermore, there were clear differences between Anglo-American and German documents, indicating that international policy development on geoengineering will be a difficult task.