Policy designs for addressing societal acceptance challenges in Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Fellowship Duration: Sep 2021 - Jan 2025
PhD Student: Susanne Rhein (LinkedIn)
Principal Investigator: Prof. Thomas Bernauer, Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS), Institute of Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Project Partner: Brilé Anderson, Environmental Economist, OECD Sahel and West Africa Club, Paris, France
Research Fields: Energy Sciences
Project Description
Climate change is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time, requiring the decarbonization of the global economy. This large-scale transition introduces significant uncertainty into policymaking, which in turn weakens public support for these measures which often impose high upfront costs on society. In democracies, where public opinion plays a crucial role in shaping policy decisions, this lack of support presents a major obstacle to implementing stringent climate policies. This project takes a multidimensional approach to examine how political factors that reduce uncertainty about future climate policy benefits influence public support for measures promoting Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies. A country’s climate strategy is shaped by the involvement of various political actors, policy design choices, the institutions responsible for their implementation and the international system. Each of these factors likely affects citizens’ confidence in climate policy’s ability to deliver future benefits and hence support for climate policies. Through survey-embedded experiments in high-income European countries, the project tests this hypothesis using novel individual-level data. The findings suggest that political factors which reduce uncertainty about the future benefits of climate policies can boost public support for expensive policies incentivizing CCS technologies. From a public opinion perspective, this indicates that policymakers may have greater flexibility to implement costly climate policies than previously assumed, provided they address sources of uncertainty in the policymaking process.
This fellowship is hosted by the Energy Science Center.
Activities and Publications
Doctoral thesis (ongoing)
PSC Blog article (2025) on Cross-border Cooperation on Carbon Capture and Storage: Why Public Opinion Matters?
ESC Energy Blog article (2024) on Expensive but effective: Why citizens support costly but durable carbon removal practices
Peer-reviewed article in Journal of European Public Policy (2024) on Do policy packages that mitigate uncertainty over long-term policy benefits increase support for costly climate action?
Peer-reviewed article in Climatic Change (2024) on Does drought exposure erode trust in the political system in Sub-Saharan Africa? (with Viktoria Jansesberger)
Peer-reviewed article in Politics and Governance (2024) on Different Perspectives on Democracy as an Explanation for the “Populist Radical Right Gender Gap (with Viktoria Jansesberger)
Policy Brief on Public Opinion on CO2 Removal in Swiss Climate Policy (2025)
Policy Brief on West Africa and the global climate agenda (2022) (with Brilé Anderson, Daniel Acosta)
Synthesis report on DemoUpCARMAWP5 Final Report (2024)
Conference talk at the European Political Science Association (Colone, Germany, Jul 2024) on Under which conditions do citizens prefer immediate over delayed policy action? The role of cost distribution within and between generations
Conference talk at the European Political Science Association (Colone, Germany, Jul 2024) on Divided governments: Does disagreement between incumbent parties shape climate policy preferences?
Conference talk at Environmental Politics and Governance Online (Online, Mar 2024) on Mitigating future uncertainties, but at what price? Myopic citizens, short-term policy cost, and long-term policy effectiveness
Conference talk at Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association (St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2024) on Mitigating future uncertainties, but at what price? Myopic citizens, short-term policy cost, and long-term policy effectiveness
Conference talk at the European Political Science Association (Glasgow, Scotland, Jun 2023) on Effective long-term or low-cost short-term environmentalism? Insights from choice experiments on carbon removal policy
Conference talk at Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association (Online, Jan 2022) on The Micro-foundations of the Climate-Conflict Nexus: Does drought have what it takes to affect political trust? (with Viktoria Jansesberger)
Conference poster at Sustainable Energy System - Who Will Lead the Way? (Zug, Switzerland, Jun 2022) on Public preferences on Policy Interventions Designed to Incentivize Deployment of Carbon Dioxide Removal
Seminar Series Talk at Zürich Political Economy Seminar (Zürich, Switzerland, May 2023) on Long-term or low-cost short-term environmentalism? Insights from choice experiments on carbon removal policy
Seminar Series Talk at Climate, Energy, Resources, Risk and Resilience Seminars (Zurich, Switzerland, May, 2023) on Long-term or low-cost short-term environmentalism? Insights from choice experiments on carbon removal policy
Seminar Series Talk at Zürich Political Economy Seminar (Zurich, Switzerland, Feb 2024) on How to avoid “Not-in-their-backyard” problems over Carbon, Capture and Storage for climate change mitigation?
Open Access Data on Effective Long-Term or Low-Cost Short-Term Environmentalism? Insights from choice experiments on carbon removal policy (2023)
Member of the Swiss Carbon Removal Platform providing feedback on Policy Brief and joining platform meetings for discussion.
Pre-registration plan on OSF (2023) on Under which conditions do citizens prefer immediate over delayed policy action? The role of cost distribution within and between generations(with Thomas Bernauer)
Pre-registration plan on OSF (2022) on Effective Long-Term or Low-Cost Short-Term Environmentalism? Insights from choice experiments on carbon removal policy (with Thomas Bernauer)
Pre-registration plan on OSF (2022) on Not in their backyard? Regime type and preferences for bilateral agreements on CO2 export (with Thomas Bernauer)
Secondment
Susanne completed her secondments at the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) in Paris which, among others, collects data and disseminates information on cities, climate and development in the Sahel and West Africa region. This work focuses mostly on urban areas, which are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Susanne conducted a systematic analysis of the Nationally Determined Contributions of 17 countries in West African countries under the Paris Agreement in close cooperation with the SWAC team. The aim was to provide an overview of West Africa’s climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies with a focus on their financing needs for COP27 participants. To do this she published a report and a blog post.
Duration: Jun – Aug 2022
Stakeholder Workshop
The presentation Analysis of effective policy designs to overcome financing and acceptance challenges was part of the review of the DemoUpCARMA project that took place at the Swiss Federal Office of Energy in Berne in October 2023. It provided an overview of facilitators of public support for policy packages that incentivize durable carbon removal and international cooperation on CO2 storage based on insights from the research conducted within this project. The audience consisted of civil servants, scientists, industrial and societal stakeholders involved in efforts to scale up Carbon, Capture, and Storage approaches in Switzerland which engaged in a Q&A session after the presentation. The exchange enabled us to locate the implications of our project findings in a border inter- and transdisciplinary context. The setting also offered the opportunity to share a public opinion perspective on Carbon, Capture, and Storage policies with stakeholders and civil servants currently shaping the Swiss policy landscape.
