Without public trust, effective climate policy is impossible

By Rob | June 5, 2025 |

Case study: Societal reasons why CCS (carbon storage and capture) is failing as a carbon management strategy.

Date: May 27, 2025

Source: Radboud University Nijmegen

Summary: When formulating climate policy, too little attention is paid to social factors and too much to technological breakthroughs and economic reasons. Because citizens are hardly heard in this process, European governments risk losing public support at a crucial moment in the climate debate.

Because citizens are hardly heard in this process … governments risk losing public support at a crucial moment

FULL STORY

When formulating climate policy, too little attention is paid to social factors and too much to technological breakthroughs and economic reasons. Because citizens are hardly heard in this process, European governments risk losing public support at a crucial moment in the climate debate. This is the conclusion of several researchers from Radboud University in a paper published this week in Earth System Governance.

Without public trust, effective climate policy is impossible, warns Vincent de Gooyert, sociologist and lead author of the article. 

“You see this, for example, in the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS). This technology is essential for achieving climate targets, but it is still barely off the ground. Industry wants government subsidies, the government says there is no public support for this, and society wants to see industry take responsibility first. But then you’re stuck in a vicious circle.”

No market value, but essential

The climate debate is currently often framed from a techno-economic perspective, explains De Gooyert. 

“Every solution must have direct market value. If that is lacking, no one is willing to take the first step. But a solution such as CCS has no direct market value. In addition to technology, regulations and subsidies, you really need that support, because a policy without support mainly results in resistance.”

De Gooyert collaborated with colleagues Senni Määttä, Sandrino Smeets and Heleen de Coninck on the article. 

Their recommendations are based, among other things, on extensive experience with discussions between government, business, citizens and other stakeholders on climate issues. 

They work with environmental organisations, industry and governments in European countries including Finland, Sweden, Spain and Belgium.

Trust

“What keeps coming back is that policy only works if there is mutual trust. People often think that if we explain it well, support will come naturally. But then you mainly have one-way communication, and research shows that this can be counterproductive. What you end up with is people thinking: there go those arrogant policymakers again, telling us what’s good for us, and if we don’t agree, they’ll push it through anyway.”

independent, scientific advisory councils, … also initiatives such as citizens’ councils

De Gooyert and his colleagues advocate the use of independent, scientific advisory councils, but also initiatives such as citizens’ councils. “Citizens must be able to form an informed opinion independently, and there must be room for complexity and nuance. We must be honest with each other in such sessions: there are difficult choices to be made, but people must be given openness about the options and the consequences. Citizens deserve a say in their environment. To offer comfort to local residents, governments and businesses will also have to make sacrifices. We won’t get there with the current method. Then we’ll remain in the situation we’re in now: no one willing to take big steps on climate policy, while time is running out.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Radboud University Nijmegen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Vincent de Gooyert, Senni Määttä, Sandrino Smeets, Heleen de Coninck. Investing in trust is crucial for a well-functioning European carbon market. Earth System Governance, 2025; 25: 100261 DOI: 10.1016/j.esg.2025.100261

Investing in trust is crucial for a well-functioning European carbon market

Vincent de Gooyert a, Senni Määttä a, Sandrino Smeets a, Heleen de Coninck bc

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2025.100261Get rights and content

Abstract

Emission reductions needed to reach the Paris Agreement goals rely heavily on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). However, CCS implementation is lagging due to complex interactions of societal and technological factors. Attempts to enhance CCS implementation focus primarily on lowering technological and economic barriers, assuming that societal support will develop if public awareness is increased. This, however, overlooks the interdependence between CCS public support, policy action and industrial implementation. Productive interaction between these factors requires mutual trust between stakeholders. Scaling up the technology will thus require appreciating the mutual dependencies and nurturing trust. Genuine investments in public trust go beyond ‘educating the public’, supporting deliberative initiatives instead and allowing for real influence of relevant stakeholders. Our recommendations include designing inclusive engagement processes, safeguarding public participation rights, involving independent scientific expertise, supporting deliberative initiatives like citizen assemblies, and fostering transparency through community-led platforms to build trust in CCS implementation.

Graphical abstract

Image 1

Keywords

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS)

Trust

Societal engagement

Public participation

Climate mitigation

Climate policy

Policy insights

  • •Policies to reach the Paris goals rely heavily on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), but implementation of the technology is lagging due to a complex interaction of societal and technological factors.
  • •Attempts to address this have focused primarily on technological and economic barriers to CCS, but we argue that trust is a crucial and currently overlooked factor. Genuine investments in the nurturing of trust will be necessary to turn around its recent erosion.
  • •We call for engagement processes beyond information dissemination, e.g. by incorporating scientific councils, citizen assemblies, and digital platforms to enable meaningful societal involvement.

1. Introduction

The role of trust is overlooked in the implementation and upscaling of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), an important technology in the European industrial carbon management strategy and Net Zero Industry Act (European Commission, 2024a). Many projections for achieving climate targets rely on substantial volumes of CCS, but how the required, rapid implementation can be realized is still an open question (Buck, 2021) or even questioned (Grant et al., 2022). Expectations for CCS have been high in assessment reports (e.g. IPCC et al., 2005; IEA, 2008; IPCC et al., 2014), but because of a lack of political and societal support (or even public opposition) as well as technological and economic barriers, progress has been insufficient during the last decades (IEA, 2023, Krevor et al., 2023; Lipponen et al., 2017).

In their attempts to facilitate implementation, policymakers have primarily focused on addressing the technological and economic barriers. For instance, the European Commission has developed a “strategy to create a single market for CO2 transport and storage services by 2030” and set a target of 50 megatons of CO2 injection annually by 2030, which is to be reached by coordinating investments along the value chain (European Commission, Directorate-General for Energy, 2023). With this strategy, attention continues to go to technological requirements, roadmaps, and financial incentives. The strategy focuses on the roles of government and industry, while implicitly assuming that societal support will follow from increasing public understanding and awareness. With additional arguments, complementary to those made earlier by many other social scientists (e.g., Van Alphen et al., 2007; Markusson et al., 2012; Ashworth et al., 2015), we contend that this technocratic approach towards CCS will continue to backfire, as it has over the past decades. It is equally important to invest in mechanisms for ensuring long-term societal legitimacy and buy-in.

In this perspective, we argue that an indispensable investment for bringing about well-functioning European industrial carbon management is to genuinely invest in trust. We also provide recommendations for decision-makers on how they can bring this about. By trust we mean the belief of actors that other actors are reliable, able, honest, fair, and authentic (Cologna and Siegrist, 2020; Drews and Van den Bergh, 2016). Trust, and especially citizens’ trust in industry and in government, is a key factor for the development of CCS in the coming decades (Cologna and Siegrist, 2020; de Coninck, 2013). We demonstrate the need for trust by showing how societal and technological factors mutually depend on each other, describe how this has been ignored by CCS decision makers so far, and offer recommendations on how this can be improved.

4. Recommendations to achieve trust through societal involvement

The complex interaction between society and technology inherently implies a crucial role for trust, and trust requires deep and genuine involvement of different societal actors with each other. Below we offer recommendations on how better societal involvement may take shape around CCS in the European industrial carbon management strategy and the Net Zero Industry Act.

One pillar of more effective societal involvement consists of modes of engagement that go beyond spreading information. Societal involvement was and is also an issue for other technologies, but for CCS this is specifically relevant as it is in general more controversial than mitigation options like wind and solar power (Ladenburg et al., 2024). There are several means to engage citizens that are higher on the ‘participation ladder’ (Arnstein, 1969), both on the level of specific CCS projects and on the level of the societal debate on the role of CCS in climate mitigation. Public participation in the energy transition generally means three things: participation through behavioral change, direct participation in renewable energy projects through shared ownership or microgeneration, and participation in decision-making processes (Määttä, 2021; Pallett et al., 2019). Behavioral change of citizens is less applicable to CCS, but participation could exist of sharing benefits with local communities through community benefit payments (Boomsma et al., 2020), or participation in decision-making processes in CCS deployment (Brunsting et al., 2011).

In efforts to tailor public participation opportunities to interested citizens, examples can be taken for example from citizen assemblies (Devaney et al., 2020), or various digital participation platforms. Transparency should be treated as the basis of all these processes and some trust should be also directed at citizens to believe that they are able to understand and form well-founded views. Whether CCS should be implemented in the first place needs to be part of the discussion. The results of participation processes should be implemented to assure that participation is authentic and not just symbolic, to avoid that participation does more harm than good (Ryder et al., 2023, ter Mors and van Leeuwen, 2023).

Unfortunately, recent developments suggest that these types of engagement might be sacrificed to speed, in the belief that surpassing such engagement is necessary to avoid delays, e.g. in Net-Zero Strategic Projects under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA). These projects include a long list of net-zero technologies, including CCS. Projects selected as the strategic projects receive a national priority status, which is intended to help these projects to receive faster administrative treatment and permitting. There projects will also receive ‘urgent treatment in judicial and dispute resolution’ (European Commission, 2024b), discussed under Article 15(4) of the Regulation on NZIA. Concerns have been raised on how this streamlining will impact environmental assessment, but what has been so far receiving little attention is the impact this can have on public participation and citizen’s trust.

Citizen participation has an important role in spatial planning (e.g. Horlings et al., 2021), and if this right is hindered, this can have a significant medium-to long-term impact on societal trust towards both industry and government. Ironically, despite a name that implies a longer-term orientation, the primary focus of the ‘strategic’ projects is on the short term, and hence the projects run the risk of falling for the myth that skipping societal engagement speeds matters up. Trust needs to be earned. Our recommendation, which has been done by others, for investing in trust is to make communication fully transparent and honest, including about the limits to public engagement. This also means stating openly that there are some things that cannot be changed even if the majority of the (involved) public so desires.

Scientists are still seen as a reliable source of information (Cologna et al., 2025; Fage-Butler et al., 2022). Beyond transparency, a recommendation is to make use of independent information provided by such sources trusted by the public. As an example, the EU and several member states have established scientific climate councils, which have the task to provide balanced and science-based climate policy advice. To improve the societal debate on the role of CCS, governments could call in help from such committees and other scientists in both the information provision and in the design of engagement processes. This would help to establish a common fact base that can serve as a basis to navigate the trade-offs surrounded by CCS. This is necessary as many current reports are presented by organizations with a certain bias or which are not seen as independent.

Another concrete action is to conduct more direct modes of democracy. For example, European and/or national citizen assemblies could help to organize the deliberative processes necessary to foster trust amongst stakeholders. Here it would be relevant to build on earlier experiences with citizen assemblies like the lessons learned in Ireland (Devaney et al., 2020).

Finally, communication about the experiences with CCS should be maintained during implementation. The development of trust over time, and the impact of investments in trust, could be tracked in longitudinal studies. Although surveys are regularly employed and they do help measure progress, they are also limited in their capacity to capture the rich nature of technology-society interactions around CCS, and are not engaging people. They should therefore be complemented by qualitative studies like focus groups and stakeholder dialogues (Swennenhuis et al., 2024). Supporting a citizens- or communities-led platform and network where local communities can report about their experiences with CCS and learn about what to look out for could contribute to the transparency and information necessary for trust to develop.

References

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