Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/17/2014
AUSTIN, Texas—While much work goes into the physical site characterization of a planned carbon capture and storage project, social site characterization is often not given the attention it needs, Emma ter Mors, senior researcher at Leiden University in the Netherland, said during a plenary address at the International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Technologies, held here last week. A lack of public support can easily halt a proposed CCS project, ter Mors said, noting that a common reason for a lack of public support is limited knowledge of CCS. “People’s awareness of CCS has increased, so they have heard about it. However, knowledge hasn’t increased at all. So people really lack a lot of knowledge on, for example, characteristics of CO2 and consequences of CO2,” she said “If you ask them [if] CCS is a climate change mitigation technology … majority would say yes, so this might sound very nice for us, but when next you ask them [if] it’s a technology that can really help to prevent acid rain, the majority says yes. When you ask them ‘Will CCS help against ozone layer problems?’ they say yes and in the end when you analyze this, less than 5 percent of people know that the unique aim of CCS is to mitigate climate change … we really should not underestimate how little people know and understand.”
Ter Mors said that much research has been done in the field of public engagement and communication, which can help to increase knowledge and affect public perception. “One of the fields that we really know a lot about by now would be communication. … We do know what people’s knowledge gaps are. We also know what their concerns are and, importantly, also a lot of tools have been developed to really address this. Tools such as information packages that are peer reviewed that have been pretested for being balanced, for being accurate and understandable and as such all of these tools really provide dos and don’ts for actual projects,” she said.
Gaining Public Trust Key to Positive Perception
There are a number of reasons the public may not trust developers of CCS projects, ter Mors said. "On the one hand, our research suggests that it is important to team up with a more trusted party, for example an NGO, which may seem challenging, and it is, but it has succeeded in the past before. Another thing that an industrial stakeholder could consider is really thinking about its communication and … the kind of motives that people ascribe to a stakeholder really affects how people perceive a stakeholder.”
While focusing on the environmentally friendly aspect of a CCS project may seem like an easy way to gain trust, this path is often unsuccessful, ter Mors said. “We found that this doesn’t really work. For example, when an industrial stakeholder says ‘I’m investing in CCS because I care about the environment,’ people perceive this to be very dishonest and it doesn’t do any good for perceived trust,” she said. “What stakeholders should do it communicate the motives that people expect from them. It works a lot better if you just acknowledge you have an economic motive, people consider this to be more honest and this really increases trust, but also you can use more of a mixed message so you can have economic motives and also a bit of public serving motive."
