Eliciting Mental Models for Understanding Reasoning for and Against Solar Geoengineering Research Dale S. Rothman, Payam Aminpour, Ilan Chabay, Jennifer Helgeson Working Paper 23-25 May 2023 About the Authors Dale S. Rothman is an associate professor in the College of Science at George Mason University. He is currently doing research in the use of scenario development and integrated modeling as applied to social-ecological systems. His recent work has focused on applying these to issues related to climate change economics and policy, including new technologies for greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management. Payam Aminpour is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Aminpour’s research revolves around how to harness the collective intelligence of human crowds to address complex issues around social and environmental sustainability like climate change, overfishing, urbanization, and most recently COVID-19. Ilan Chabay is an adjunct professor in the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, chair of the External Research Evaluation Committee of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, and co-director of KLASICA, the Knowledge, Learning, and Societal Change Alliance, which is an open international research alliance founded by Ilan in 2008. KLASICA conducts transdisciplinary research at the community and regional scale to develop policy and practice-relevant knowledge of factors, including narratives, that positively or negatively influence collective behavior change to just, equitable cultures of sustainability. Jennifer Helgeson is affiliated with the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) School of Public & International Affairs. Her research interests focus on decision science, including survey assessments and economic analyses that consider behavioral aspects and approaches to dealing with environmental issues. Helgeson’s research revolves around resilience to hazards (shocks and stressors) in the built and natural environments, with consideration for cost-effectiveness of community- scale climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Acknowledgments We acknowledge support from the L.A.D. Climate Fund and useful comments and feedback from Resources for the Future (RFF) workshops’ participants. We are also grateful to Mariia Belaia, Edward Parson, Steven Gray, Amanda Borth, and Miranda Boettcher for helpful comments and discussions. Resources for the Future i About RFF Resources for the Future (RFF) is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. RFF is committed to being the most widely trusted source of research insights and policy solutions leading to a healthy environment and a thriving economy. Working papers are research materials circulated by their authors for purposes of information and discussion. They have not necessarily undergone formal peer review. The views expressed here are those of the individual authors and may differ from those of other RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. About the Project The Resources for the Future Solar Geoengineering research project applies tools from multiple social science research disciplines to better understand the risks, potential benefits, and societal implications of solar geoengineering as a possible approach to help reduce climate risk alongside aggressive and necessary mitigation and adaptation efforts. The project began in 2020 with a series of expert workshops convened under the SRM Trans-Atlantic Dialogue. These meetings resulted in a 2021 article in Science that lays out a set of key social science research questions associated with solar geoengineering research and potential deployment. The Project followed this with additional sponsored research, including a competitive solicitation designed to address research areas highlighted in the Science article. This paper is one of eight research papers resulting from that competition and supported by two author workshops. A key goal of the solicitation and the overall project is to engage with a broader set of researchers from around the globe, a growing number of interested stakeholders, and the public. Sharing Our Work Our work is available for sharing and adaptation under an Attribution-NonCommercialNoDeri