Chinese public’s perceptions and understanding of the potential roles of solar climate engineering for reducing climate change risks

Limiting global temperature increases appear to be an exceedingly challenging task due to great difficulty in advancing carbon reduction emission negotiation. Solar climate engineering is emerging as an emergency shield for climate risks. Except for its technical feasibility and reasonable costs, public understanding is essential for future implementation. Compared with wide studies in Europe and North America, our study was the first large-scale survey to comprehensively investigate the Chinese public’s attitude toward solar climate engineering. Moreover, our study was the first to focus on combined solar climate engineering schemes and investigate Public attitude toward international governance and regulatory structures. Our survey revealed that: The surveyed Chinese participants perceived a high level of its deployment costs and a middle level of its effectiveness, technical readiness and side effects. A majority of surveyed participants supported China’s active role in international governance and regulatory structures for solar climate engineering. About a half of the surveyed participants were willing to pay taxes to support related research and possible future deployment. However, when solar climate engineering was compared with seven mainstream climate change mitigation schemes, Chinese participants favored less priority and less funding for solar climate engineering. This means that Chinese participants viewed it as only a backup option in climate strategies.