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Although the need for urgent climate change action is clear, insights about how to make better climate risk management decisions are limited. While significant attention from behavioral researchers has focused on choice architecture, we argue that many of the contexts for addressing climate risks require increased attention to the needs of a deliberative and dynamic choice environment. A key facet of this kind of decision is the need for decision-makers and stakeholders to identify and balance conflicting economic, social and environmental objectives. This recognition of difficult, context-specific trade-offs highlights the need for structuring the decision-making process so that objectives are clearly articulated and prioritized. Equally, policy analyses and deliberations must effectively link priorities with climate risk management options. This restructuring of decision-making about climate change calls for more than a nudge. Scientific and technical efforts must be redirected to help stakeholders and decision-makers better understand the diverse implications of climate change management alternatives and to become better equipped to take actions commensurate with the urgency of the problem. 

The adoption of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies at a scale sufficient to draw down carbon emissions will require both individual and collective decisions that happen over time in different locations to enable a massive scale-up. Members of the public and other decision-makers have not yet formed strong attitudes, beliefs and preferences about most of the individual CDR technologies or taken positions on policy mechanisms and tax-payer support for CDR. Much of the current discourse among scientists, policy analysts and policy-makers about CDR implicitly assumes that decision-makers will exhibit unbiased, rational behaviour that weighs the costs and benefits of CDR. In this paper, we review behavioural decision theory and discuss how public reactions to CDR will be different from and more complex than that implied by rational choice theory. Given that people do not form attitudes and opinions in a vacuum, we outline how fundamental social normative principles shape important intergroup, intragroup and social network processes that influence support for or opposition to CDR technologies. We also point to key insights that may help stakeholders craft public outreach strategies that anticipate the nuances of how people evaluate the risks and benefits of CDR approaches. Finally, we outline critical research questions to understand the behavioural components of CDR to plan for an emerging public response. 

Abstract Determinations of significance play a pivotal role in environmental impact assessments because they point decision makers to the predicted effects of an action most deserving of attention and further study. Impact predictions are always subject to uncertainty because they rely on estimates of future consequences. Yet uncertainty is often neglected or treated in a perfunctory manner as part of the characterization, evaluation, and communication of anticipated consequences and their significance. Proposals to construct fossil fuel pipelines in North America provide a highly visible example; casual treatment of how uncertainty affects significance determinations has resulted in poorly informed stakeholders, frustrated industry proponents, and inconsistent choices on the part of public decision makers. Using environmental assessments for recent pipeline proposals as examples, we highlight five ways in which uncertainty is often neglected when determining impact significance and suggest that a mix of known methods, new guidelines, and appropriate oversight could greatly improve current practices.