UK Public Dialogue Finds Support for SRM Research, With Reservations

The United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has released a report on a public dialogue it convened regarding SRM. The effort, conducted by the social research firm Hopkins Van Mil, reflects what some in the field say is a critical need to engage with the public as research into the technologies continues to expand.

“My views have changed radically because when I first heard about it, I thought, ‘this is sci-fi and it’s completely crazy’”, said one of 52 participants, who were drawn from across varying regions of the UK and who were “broadly reflective” of the country’s population, according to the report. “As we’ve gone through it and talked about the different ways of doing it, I can see that there’s been considered thought and it’s not completely crazy.”

The dialogue was commissioned in April 2025, alongside £10 million in funding from NERC for four SRM modelling projects; the funding is separate from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency programme providing £56.8 million to 22 projects exploring “climate cooling” ideas.

“As interest in SRM increases, discussions about governance and ethics are gaining momentum”, wrote NERC’s director of strategy and performance Kate Hamer in a foreword to the new report. “[A]s such, it is vital that public perspectives help shape research priorities and principles from the outset.”

The dialogue included a series of four workshops – three online and one in person – in which the participants heard from 19 experts on various aspects of SRM science, governance, ethics, and other topics. Participants had opportunities to ask questions and discuss the issues, and were given tasks such as discussing SRM with friends and family between the workshops.

In general, the participants entered into the public dialogue with little or no knowledge of SRM, and viewed it with scepticism. The report says that over the course of the workshops, most gradually shifted their opinions, “coming to see SRM as serious research with significant implications”.

More support for modelling research than outdoor experiments

The results are not unlike other public engagement work on SRM – including a previous NERC-led public dialogue on geoengineering (incorporating other technologies beyond SRM) in 2010.

“Earlier focus groups, deliberations, citizens’ juries, and surveys going well back before Covid found similar things”, said Dr Christine Merk, deputy director of the Kiel Institute’s Global Commons and Climate Policy research group in Germany, in an email to SRM360. She was not involved with the NERC public dialogue, but has conducted other research on public perceptions of SRM.

Many of the participants in the public dialogue came to “strongly support” computer modelling research into SRM, in order to better understand potential impacts of deployment and to reduce the number of unknowns or unintended consequences. They were much more wary, however, of outdoor experiments and potential deployment, arguing that SRM would not solve the root problem of climate change, and that global governance of such a programme “seems near to impossible”, among other things.

“My personal reflection on involvement with the NERC public dialogue was how engaged the public were with the science and the speakers”, said Prof. James Haywood, one of 13 experts included in an Oversight Group that helped shape the project, in an email to SRM360. “Provided they are briefed in an unbiased and objective way, the public are quite capable of understanding the nuances of SRM research including assessing the scientific results, associated risks and moral and ethical hazards.”

Public perception research: a small but growing field

The dialogue adds to a growing body of literature on public perceptions of SRM – though it is still relatively limited in scope.

“While such research is useful wherever it is done, we have stressed in our research how three countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany) have dominated the public perceptions literature on SRM”, said Dr Chad Baum, an assistant professor at Aarhus University who was also not involved with the NERC public dialogue, in an email. “It is ethically and pragmatically necessary to engage with publics across the Global South.”

Baum and Merk were among the co-authors of one recent study that aimed to expand in those directions, examining attitudes toward SRM in Bangladesh. There was some enthusiasm toward SRM among focus group participants there, especially among those whose livelihoods were already under threat from rising temperatures and extended dry periods.

Another study led by Baum drew from more than 30,000 survey respondents across 30 countries. It found that members of the public in the Global South tend to “express greater support for climate-intervention technologies” than those in the Global North.

“We cannot leave the debate to a few techno-optimists from industrialized countries”, Merk said. “To make other voices heard, the community has to foster broad engagement. Consistent findings across contexts actually strengthen the evidence, and remind the research community that these concerns are not going away.”

A call for greater public engagement

The NERC public dialogue participants developed a set of “core principles” to guide SRM research. These included avoiding harm to people or the environment, avoiding distraction from emissions reductions, focusing on global collaboration and public engagement, prioritising the public good not just at present but for future generations, and ensuring transparency and accountability.

“I feel like lots of work and money and research needs to go into working with the public to inform them and to talk through the options”, one of the participants said, according to the report. “I feel like most people aren’t aware of the situation in all its complexity and severity, and do not understand what the options are at all really.” The participants stressed that the public needs more information on the pros and cons of SRM, as well as who is funding and conducting the research.

Baum noted that these core principles, developed across just a few workshops over the course of weeks, line up well with those upheld by much of the research community. “This would seem to indicate that much in the way of understanding and awareness could be achieved through public engagement in a rather short period of time”, he said.

While the overall feeling in the group shifted towards supporting SRM research over the course of the workshops, some participants reported that their opinions remained fixed against SRM throughout. They cited the need to remain focused on reducing emissions to zero and an opposition to the idea of “playing God” with planetary systems, as well as a concern that global collaborative governance will not be possible.

“I’m not sold”, one participant said. “I didn’t know anything about it beforehand. But the more I hear, the more I think there could be too many risks for using it on any kind of scale.”

Merk said that social science research, like this public dialogue, are often overlooked in technological or scientific debates. “Surveys, focus groups, and deliberations are not just engagement and outreach; they are often also social science research advancing our understanding of how people think about unprecedented, deliberate interventions in the Earth system, particularly in the case of SAI”, she said. “SRM and the idea of it will not just influence the climate but also people, politics, and societies.”