Sara Nawaz is an environmental social scientist who studies the social dimensions of technologies and policies aimed at using the oceans to suck up CO2, an approach that researchers call marine-based carbon dioxide removal, or mCDR for short. She is also the Director of Research at American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, where she studies how carbon removal strategies might be designed in inclusive, just, equitable, and responsible ways.
Sara first partnered with us for a panel COMPASS organized entitled Ethics, Partnership, and Social Science in Ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal for Capitol Hill Ocean Week. In February 2024, she also participated in a COMPASS strategic communication training through a partnership with the ClimateWorks Foundation for scientists and experts in marine-based carbon dioxide removal.
The methods and processes for mCDR technologies are still in an exploratory stage—it’s not clear yet if they will work and what kinds of risks and benefits they will bring about. Immersed in this context, Sara has thought deeply about the tricky balance that technical experts must strike when sharing their expertise with others in ways that promote honest, open-ended, two-way conversations and avoid tilting people’s attitudes toward one outcome over another.
In this interview with COMPASS’s Nicolle Etchart, Sara shares why she is excited to work in this field and offers some insights on what scientists should consider when thinking about how to meaningfully and ethically engage with people around novel technologies like mCDR.
Nicolle Etchart: Sara, tell us a little bit about yourself—how did you come to this work? What inspired you to study the ethical and social dimensions of marine-based carbon dioxide removal (mCDR), and what aspects of this work continue to compel you to push this work forward?
Sara Nawaz: I did my PhD on the topic of gene editing in agriculture, so my background is in thinking about the social aspects of novel technologies that are relevant in the environmental and climate space. I got really interested in carbon removal towards the end of my PhD—I was pulled in as a research assistant on a project involving carbon removal, and just got completely obsessed with the topic. Gene editing in agriculture is definitely a topic with many climate-relevant aspects, but I felt like I wanted to be working in a space that felt more directly relevant to climate change. And there is a lot of overlap in the kinds of themes that come up around broader social and ethical aspects of those technologies—things like, who gets to have a say in whether these move ahead or what they look like? What would it look like to meaningfully integrate public priorities into designing research on these technologies? Should the ‘naturalness’ (or not) of technologies matter for whether we proceed with them or not?
Carbon removal is a pretty new topic and there’s not a lot of folks in the social science space thinking about it, which can be frustrating because I think the questions are so important, but it also makes it really fun. I enjoy working on a topic where it feels like there is just so much work to be done and so many interesting and important questions to ask. A lot of my work on carbon removal is motivated by worries about how these technologies could be deployed in bad or unjust ways, but I also feel a lot of hope working on this aspect of climate change research, and I think that combination keeps me motivated.
“A lot of my work on carbon removal is motivated by worries about how these technologies could be deployed in bad or unjust ways, but I also feel a lot of hope working on this aspect of climate change research”
NE: Using the ocean to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is quickly rising up the climate policy agenda as a potential way to help us reach climate goals alongside substantial emissions reduction. And yet, even though this is a pivotal time for this field, mCDR technologies are still pretty unfamiliar to most people. There is just not a whole lot of knowledge about them. Looking ahead, it seems that scientists and researchers need to play a key role in helping society understand the current state of the science on this technology, as well as its potential risks and impacts to communities. In turn, mCDR science can and should be informed and guided by the people impacted by the research.
In this context, how can mCDR information be made accessible? And how can all this communication among experts and publics take place in a way that is balanced and enables communities and stakeholders to inform and guide mCDR research with their own priorities?
SN: Yes, absolutely—all of the things you mention are super important. People—Tribal nations and other Indigenous groups, coastal communities, and others— should play a role in shaping the research questions that get studied, in part because they almost certainly will have questions that technical experts, physical scientists or engineers won’t be aware of. In a lot of sectors, engagement with publics has been done in a performative way, meaning that information flows in one direction, with those affected mainly just on the receiving end of the information. Engagement is also often superficial in nature, meaning that feedback doesn’t get meaningfully incorporated into a project, or it only does at the very margins or late stages of a project.
Marine-based CDR is what we would call an “upstream” technology: the concept might be there, but a more detailed understanding of what kind of system it would fit into—things like monitoring and reporting, the supply chain, the ecological impacts, the locations it would be deployed at, etc.—all of that is extremely speculative at present. That means that mCDR could look many different ways, which makes it difficult to have a clear or specific object around which to engage people, something you can provide really specific details on.
“For emerging technologies like mCDR, it’s really important to have a very open-ended conversation with people around what things could look like, so that the conversation doesn’t get fixated on a version of mCDR that represents only one way that it could actually play out…”
For emerging technologies like mCDR, it’s really important to have a very open-ended conversation with people around what things could look like, so that the conversation doesn’t get fixated on a version of mCDR that represents only one way that it could actually play out, like, say, one particular technical approach proposed by a single company.
Something I am thinking a lot about right now in terms of my own research and work is the importance of bringing in some imaginative, future-oriented, scenario-based work for talking to people about a broader range of possible ways that things could play out in the future. I think this is a space where there’s a need for a lot more collaboration between natural and social scientists, to develop more detailed materials that can give people a more tangible sense of what these technologies might look like at these really scaled-up levels. This is all particularly important to do, I think, given the massive scale-up needed with carbon removal— to the tune of 2-10 gigatonnes by 2050—but also incredibly challenging.
To further complicate things I think it’s also really important to not just talk to people about the very specific activities occurring in or near marine or coastal environments. It’s also really important to talk to people about the full life-cycle of these technologies, all of the resources and materials that they would involve.
There is so much more I could say about this, but one last thing I’ll say for now is that the ‘who’ of doing these communications and engagement activities is really important. I think it’s really important that there are trusted actors who do not have vested interests in seeing specific technologies get developed or have financial ties to projects, in order to make sure that this engagement is being done in ways that generate trust.
“I think it’s really important that there are trusted actors who do not have vested interests in seeing specific technologies get developed or have financial ties to projects, in order to make sure that this engagement is being done in ways that generate trust.”
NE: I’ve heard you advocate for framing communication about mCDR around ‘trade-offs’ instead of ‘solutions’ to a climate emergency. What’s at stake in this distinction, and what does it enable?
SN: I think there are a couple reasons why it’s important to talk about mCDR via a language of ‘trade-offs’ rather than ‘solutions’. First, it’s easy to unconsciously assume that we know exactly what the future would look like. But given climate change, we actually need to be comparing a future with mCDR with a very different future in which climate change is a lot worse than it is right now. So we need to talk to people not just about whether we want mCDR or not, but also think about its risks, harms, and uncertainties, as opposed to those that are brought about by climate change. It’s cognitively difficult to compare something that doesn’t exist yet with something else that doesn’t exist yet, and many of us who are really worried about climate change still will default to assuming that things will just continue on as they are.
Another reason is that marine carbon dioxide removal will bring changes of all kinds to marine environments and social systems—positive, negative, and neutral. These changes will vary in terms of who experiences them, and they will also potentially be quite large in scale, given what the IPCC tells us about the growing need for carbon removal in coming decades. These changes will also vary depending on the specific technical configurations and governance arrangements that we put into place.
“Win-win outcomes are very tempting and compelling, but they are unfortunately extremely rare in complex topics like this, and often only appear as such because you haven’t paid attention to another important dimension of the situation.”
Win-win outcomes are very tempting and compelling, but they are unfortunately extremely rare in complex topics like this, and often only appear as such because you haven’t paid attention to another important dimension of the situation. I think that presenting mCDR to people as ‘trade-offs’ highlights the complex and still unknown nature of interventions like these, which will not have one single outcome that can be classified as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This framing also puts the emphasis on the details, the nuances, the broader systems—things like, who oversees the monitoring? Who funds these projects? Where do the energy and materials come from? All of these questions make for much richer conversation and deeper reflection on the subject.
NE: Thank you, Sara, for sharing these insights with the COMPASS community. We are looking forward to continuing these discussions around ethical and meaningful engagement, and what that can actually look like in real life!
To learn more about Sara’s work and thinking on these issues, check out her recent papers below or connect with her on linkedin or github.
More from Sara Nawaz:
- Grappling with a sea change: Tensions in expert imaginaries of marine carbon dioxide removal
- Towards just, responsible, and socially viable carbon removal: lessons from offshore DACCS research for early-stage carbon removal projects
