Integrating Risk Perception with Climate Models to Understand the Potential Deployment of Solar Radiation Modification to Mitigate Climate Change Brian Beckage, Katherine Lacasse, Kaitlin T. Raimi, and Daniele Visioni Working Paper 23-22 May 2023 About the Authors Brian Beckage is a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Vermont. He is an ecologist broadly interested in complex systems, especially the interaction of natural and human components of the Earth system. Beckage emphasizes quantitative approaches to investigate the dynamics of complex systems, including statistical models, analytical models, and computer simulation models. Katherine Lacasse is an associate professor at Rhode Island College. Lacasse is broadly interested in understanding the motivations behind people's concern and willingness to take action to address social problems. Much of her work is conducted as part of interdisciplinary teams, integrating ideas and methods from several fields to generate new approaches to studying environmental issues. Kaitlin T. Raimi is an associate professor of public policy at the Ford School at the University of Michigan. As a social/environmental psychologist, her interests center on how individuals can promote or prevent sustainable behaviors and policies. She has three broad areas of research: (1) how people compare their own beliefs and behaviors to others, (2) how adopting one pro-environmental behavior affects later action, and (3) how climate change communication affects people’s understanding, behaviors, and support for climate policies and technologies. Daniele Visioni is a research associate at Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and co-chair of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). His main area of expertise is the behavior of stratospheric aerosols and how they interact with atmospheric chemistry and with the surface climate. He is also a part-time project scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Center in Boulder, Colorado, working on implementing better aerosol microphysics schemes in the Community Earth System Model. 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-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. You can copy and redistribute our material in any medium or format; you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made, and you may not apply additional restrictions. You may do so in any reasonable