Mapping the landscape of climate engineering

Oldham, Paul and Szerszynski, Bronislaw and Stilgoe, Jack and Brown, Calum and Eacott, Bella and Yuille, Andy (2015) Mapping the landscape of climate engineering. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 372 (2031): 20140065. pp. 1-20. ISSN 0264-3820

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Abstract

In the absence of a governance framework for climate engineering technologies such as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), the practices of scientific research and intellectual property acquisition can de facto shape the development of the field. It is therefore important to make visible emerging patterns of research and patenting, which we suggest can effectively be done using bibliometric methods. We explore the challenges in defining the boundary of climate engineering, and set out the research strategy taken in this study. A dataset of 825 scientific publications on climate engineering between 1971 and 2013 was identified, including 193 on solar radiation management; these are analyzed in terms of trends, institutions, authors and funders. For our patent dataset, we identified 143 first filings directly or indirectly related to climate engineering technologies – of which 28 were related to SRM technologies – linked to 910 family members. We analyze the main patterns discerned in patent trends, applicants, and inventors. We compare our own findings with those of an earlier bibliometric study of climate engineering, and show how our method is consistent with the need for transparency and repeatability, and the need to adjust the method as the field develops. We conclude that bibliometric monitoring techniques can play an important role in the anticipatory governance of climate engineering.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A
Additional Information:
© 2014 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300
Subjects:
?? geoengineeringclimate engineeringbibliometricspatentsintellectual propertyanticipatory governancesocial sciences(all) ??
ID Code:
72437
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
09 Jan 2015 17:01
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
31 Dec 2023 00:32