Fairness, Not Raw Power, Decides Whether the Public Backs Carbon Removal

As the world races to pull carbon dioxide out of the sky, a sweeping new study delivers a stark warning to governments and developers: the public will judge these technologies not by how much carbon they remove, but by how fairly they are run. The research, published in Nature Climate Change, draws on nationally representative surveys of 10,852 people across six countries spanning three continents and radically different political systems, and it finds that procedural and distributive fairness are the single strongest levers of public support for novel carbon dioxide removal. Consultation, benefit sharing and not-for-profit structures consistently boosted backing for projects, while raw removal capacity could not buy back trust squandered by closed doors and privatized profits.

The study focused on three of the most prominent engineered carbon removal methods now moving from laboratory to real-world deployment. Direct air carbon capture and storage, or DACCS, strips carbon dioxide from ambient air using chemical sorbents and locks it underground. Bioenergy carbon capture and storage, known as BECCS, grows biomass that absorbs carbon, burns it for energy and captures the resulting emissions. Enhanced rock weathering, or ERW, spreads crushed silicate minerals on land, accelerating natural chemical reactions that pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and eventually lock it away in oceans and soils. Each carries a distinct risk and cost profile, from land-use conflicts and energy demands to mining and transport burdens, yet the researchers discovered something remarkable: the technology itself mattered far less than the way it was implemented.

To isolate what actually drives public acceptance, the team ran a multifactorial vignette experiment embedded in surveys conducted in Brazil, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Roughly 1,800 respondents per country were assigned to one of the three technologies and then evaluated five hypothetical projects out of 36 possible variants. Each project description differed along four attributes grounded in a multidimensional conception of justice: who implemented the project, whether the decision-making process involved consultation, how profits were distributed, and how much carbon the project could remove. Respondents rated each project on a ten-point scale from strong opposition to strong support, generating more than 54,000 individual evaluations for statistical analysis.

The headline result is unambiguous. Across every country and every technology, procedural fairness exerted the strongest effect on support. Compared with projects approved by authorities without any consultation, opening the decision-making process to local communities or scientific experts increased support by roughly 1.0 to 1.7 points on the ten-point scale. The effect was largest in Brazil, where consulting the affected population raised support by 1.68 points, and smallest but still substantial in Saudi Arabia, at just over 1.0 point. Notably, consulting local communities and consulting scientific experts produced nearly identical gains, suggesting that what matters to the public is the principle of being heard, not the specific identity of who is asked.

Distributive fairness came a close second. When developers retained all profits, projects fared worst. Redistributing revenues to affected local communities increased support by between roughly 0.5 and 1.25 scale points, with the largest effect again in Brazil, followed by the United Kingdom and Italy. Not-for-profit arrangements, in which carbon removal operates as a public service without generating profit, also raised support everywhere, though less dramatically in Saudi Arabia. By contrast, whether a company or a regional government carried out the project made little difference in most countries, with only a modest penalty for corporate implementation in the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway and Malaysia. The lesson for the emerging carbon removal industry is uncomfortable: the public appears far more interested in how benefits flow than in who owns the machinery.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns trade-offs. The researchers tested whether a project promising high removal capacity could compensate for unfair governance, and the answer was a clear no. Across nearly all countries, the effect of increasing carbon removal was remarkably similar regardless of whether projects consulted anyone or shared profits. Respondents rewarded projects that were both effective and fairly governed, but these two considerations operated independently. A high-capacity project run without consultation and with privatized profits still lost the support that fairness would have generated. The reverse also held: progressive governance could not rescue a project with meager removal performance. From the perspective of public legitimacy, neither technical excellence nor ethical design alone is sufficient.

Support levels themselves varied across countries in ways the authors interpret cautiously. Brazil and Saudi Arabia showed the highest average support, with means between roughly 7.1 and 7.3, while European respondents were more moderate, with Norway recording the lowest scores, averaging around 5.1 to 5.4 depending on the technology. The researchers warn that cross-cultural differences in survey response styles, such as tendencies toward acquiescence or avoiding extreme answers, may partly explain these gaps, and they emphasize the experimentally varied attributes over absolute levels. Within Europe, DACCS consistently received lower support than the other two methods, while in Malaysia no significant differences emerged among the technologies at all.

When asked directly what level of public involvement would be fair, respondents revealed a strong appetite for engagement. Allocating decision-making authority to local communities was judged the fairest option for permitting projects by around 44 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom and Italy, 43 percent in Norway, and between 34 and 39 percent in Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. Only a tiny fraction, between 2 and 9 percent, thought local communities should have no involvement at all. Strikingly, political orientation played almost no role in shaping support, a sharp contrast with the well-documented polarization of climate attitudes more broadly. Carbon removal, the data suggest, has not yet been absorbed into partisan identity, and public judgments rest instead on risk perceptions, trust and effectiveness.

Even self-described opponents of hosting carbon removal near their homes responded to fairness cues. Dividing respondents into opponents, moderates and supporters of local projects, the researchers found similar preference structures across all three groups, with opponents reacting as strongly or more strongly to governance attributes than anyone else. Opponents, in other words, do not categorically reject carbon removal; they remain open to projects developed through consultation and benefit sharing. This conditional openness offers developers a genuine path forward, but also a narrow one, since perceived injustice can trigger the protests, litigation and delays that have stalled energy infrastructure around the world.

The authors caution that today’s moderate support and weak polarization reflect the novelty of these technologies and low public familiarity, not a stable consensus. As real projects take shape and costs, trade-offs and distributional questions become tangible, controversies are likely to intensify, and spillovers from adjacent debates over biofuels, carbon storage, fracking or nuclear waste could reshape perceptions rapidly. Their prescriptions are correspondingly structural: open decision processes to public and expert scrutiny, treat carbon removal as a public good rather than a profit engine, and experiment with regional, upstream engagement at the planning stage rather than leaving participation to developer-led consultations after key choices are made. With national carbon removal governance still nascent in most of the world, the window for embedding justice into deployment pathways remains open, but the study’s message is that it will not stay that way for long.

Subject of Research: Public support for novel carbon dioxide removal technologies and the role of procedural and distributive fairness in their governance

Article Title: Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness

Article References: Fritz, L., Losi, L., Merk, C., Boldrini, M., Bosetti, V., Baum, C. M., & Sovacool, B. K. (2026). Public support for novel carbon removal hinges on procedural and distributive fairness. Nature Climate Change, 16(10), 1152-1161. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02741-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02741-7

Keywords: carbon dioxide removal, public perception, procedural fairness, distributive fairness, direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced rock weathering, climate governance, survey experiment, social acceptance, climate policy, benefit sharing