Potential for large-scale CO removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands.

Enhanced silicate rock weathering (ERW), deployable with croplands, has potential use for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO) removal (CDR), which is now necessary to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. ERW also has possible co-benefits for improved food and soil security, and reduced ocean acidification. Here we use an integrated performance modelling approach to make an initial techno-economic assessment for 2050, quantifying how CDR potential and costs vary among nations in relation to business-as-usual energy policies and policies consistent with limiting future warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Perceptions of enhanced weathering as a biological negative emissions option.

This paper addresses the social acceptability of enhanced weathering, a technology that would involve spreading silicate particles over terrestrial surfaces in order to boost the biological processes that currently sequester CO as part of the earth's natural carbon cycle. We present the first exploration of British attitudes towards enhanced weathering, using an online survey ( = 935) of a representative quota sample of the public. Baseline awareness of weathering was extremely low.

The perceived health risks of indoor radon gas and overhead powerlines: a comparative multilevel approach.

Radon and overhead powerlines are two radiation risk cases that have raised varying levels of concern among the general public and experts. Despite both involving radiation-a typically feared and unseen health hazard-individuals' perceptions of the two risk cases may invoke rather different factors. We examined individual and geographic-contextual factors influencing public perceptions of the health risks of indoor radon gas and overhead powerlines in a comparative research design, utilizing a postal questionnaire with 1,528 members of the general public (response rate 28%) and multilevel modeling techniques.

Exploring the structure of attitudes toward genetically modified food.

Although it is often thought that the British public is opposed to genetically modified (GM) food, recent qualitative work suggests that most people are ambivalent about GM food and crops. In this article we explore the structure of attitudes in order to examine whether attitudinal ambivalence can be captured by more quantitative methods. Based on the finding that the perceived risks and benefits of GM food can be treated as independent dimensions, we propose a four-way typology of attitudes, consisting of a positive, negative, indifferent, and ambivalent group.

Dangerous climate change: the role for risk research.

The notion of "dangerous climate change" constitutes an important development of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It persists, however, as an ambiguous expression, sustained by multiple definitions of danger. It also implicitly contains the question of how to respond to the complex and multi-disciplinary risk issues that climate change poses.

Using surveys in public participation processes for risk decision making: the case of the 2003 British GM Nation? Public debate.

This article takes as its case study the "GM Nation?" public debate, a major participation process on the commercialization of agricultural biotechnology, which occurred in Britain during the summer of 2003. We investigate possible self-selection biases in over 36,000 open questionnaire responses on the risks and benefits of genetically modified crops and food obtained during GM Nation? A comparison sample of equivalent responses from a statistically representative sample (n = 1,363) of the British general public obtained shortly after the conclusion of the debate is reported. This comparison shows that the GM Nation? open responses were indeed not fully representative of British "public opinion" regarding agricultural biotechnology.

Trust in risk regulation: cause or consequence of the acceptability of GM food?

Although there is ample empirical evidence that trust in risk regulation is strongly related to the perception and acceptability of risk, it is less clear what the direction of this relationship is. This article explores the nature of the relationship, using three separate data sets on perceptions of genetically modified (GM) food among the British public. The article has two discrete but closely interrelated objectives.

Trust, the asymmetry principle, and the role of prior beliefs.

Within the risk literature there is an ongoing debate on whether trust is vulnerable or enduring. Previous research on nuclear energy by Slovic in 1993 has shown that negative events have much greater impact on self-reported trust than do positive events. Slovic attributes this to the asymmetry principle: specifically, that trust is much easier to destroy than to create.

Exploring the dimensionality of trust in risk regulation.

This article investigates possible differential levels of trust in government regulation across five different risk contexts and the relationship between a number of concepts that might be thought of as comprising distinctive "dimensions" of trust. It appeared that how people perceive government and its policies toward risk regulation was surprisingly similar for each of the five risk cases. A principal-component analysis showed that the various trust items could best be described by two dimensions: a general trust dimension, which was concerned with a wide range of trust-relevant aspects, such as competence, care, fairness, and openness, and a scepticism component that reflects a sceptical view regarding how risk policies are brought about and enacted.