Community Acceptance: Findings from community profiles and first local survey

This deliverable by PilotSTRATEGY WP6 on Social Acceptance and Community Engagement reports work on understanding societal contexts in the regions under study in this Horizon 2020 project.WP6 has so far focussed on characterizing the overall setting in which the discussions around potential geological storage of CO2 take place. In a next step, WP6 will centre on actual engagement and participation with key stakeholders and other members of local communities. The report focuses on the six relevant regions in the five PilotSTRATEGY countries (Portugal, Spain, France, Poland, Greece) and presents regional community profiles developed through interviews, media and documentary analyses, as well as results of a first wave of survey exploring community acceptance. The relevant regions are the Lusitanian Basin in Portugal including an onshore and an offshore area next to each other, the Ebro Basin in Spain, also including an onshore and an offshore area in different parts of the Basin, Spain’s Ebro Basin, Spain’s Ebro Delta, the Paris basin in France, and Upper Silesia in Poland and West Macedonia in Greece. In Portugal and Spain preliminary characterizations will lead to focus in the remainder of the project on just one of the two options. Overall, in Portugal, Spain and France smaller regions are considered than in Poland and Greece. Detailed enquiries from various perspectives (geological, technical, economic, and social) are intended to support the potential implementation of pilot storage sites in these three countries after the lifetime of the research project PilotSTRATEGY. We report that with regard to societal preparedness that the levels of awareness and knowledge on carbon capture and storage (CCS) are very low. This applies to citizens, but also to some societal stakeholders. The implication of this finding is that opinions and preferences regarding CCS are still under development in societies, and current levels of acceptance are preliminary and likely subject to change. The results share some commonalities across countries and regions, while the analyses also detected a series of local specificities. Our surveys indicated that a majority of citizens and stakeholders state positive attitudes towards CO2 storage as a climate mitigation measure. At the same time, negative views could be identified among the societal stakeholders interviewed, in certain media depictions, and also among relevant shares of citizens among the survey respondents. Important topics in the discussion are the expected environmental impacts as well as the opportunities to be offered for participation and engagement.