Horizon Europe
European Research Council (ERC)

Application Form
Technical Description (Part B)

ERC Public Engagement with Research Award 2026
(ERC-2026-PERA)

Version 1.0
10 September 2025

IMPORTANT NOTICE
What is the application form?
The application form is the template for EU prize applications; it must be submitted via the EU Funding & Tenders Portal before the call deadline. 
The form consists of 2 parts:
•	Part A contains structured administrative information  
•	Part B is a narrative technical description of the application. 
Part A is generated by the IT system. It is based on the information which you enter into the Portal submission system screens. 
Part B needs to be uploaded as PDF in the submission system. The templates to use are available there.
How to prepare and submit it?
The application form must be prepared by the applicant. Once submitted, you will receive a confirmation.
Character and page limits:
•	page limit: 12 pages (Part B) counting from and including the cover page 
•	minimum font size — Arial 9 points 
•	page size: A4 
•	top and bottom margins: at least 1,5 cm (not including headers & footers); left and right margins: at least 2 cm
Please abide by the formatting rules. They are not a target! Keep your text as concise as possible. Three hyperlinks serving as evidence of the public engagement activity can be included in your text. Do not use hyperlinks to describe how the award criteria are met. Evaluators will not consider as evidence any additional hyperlinks.
 If you attempt to upload an application that exceeds the specified limit, you will receive an automatic warning asking you to shorten and re-upload your application. After you have submitted it, any excess pages will be made invisible and thus disregarded by the evaluators.
 Please do NOT delete any content in the template application form (including the cover page, the important notice, the instructions and the history of changes table), except in the fields to fill in. The overall page-limit has been raised to ensure equal treatment of all applicants.

APPLICATION FORM (PART B)

Part B of the application form must be downloaded from the Portal submission system, completed, and then assembled and re-uploaded as PDF in the system. 
Note: Please take due account of the call conditions published on the Portal. Pay particular attention to the award criteria; they explain how the application will be evaluated.
PROJECT  The project name, acronym and Principal Investigator contact should refer to the present contest application and be those filled-in in Part A. 	
Project name:	GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe	
Project Acronym: 	GENIE	
Coordinator (ERC Principal Investigator) contact:
(In case of joint application of Synergy PIs, please fill in all names and indicate who the lead PI is)	Prof. Benjamin Sovacool, Aarhus University	

ERC funded project 
Please provide the number, acronym and title of the ERC funded project linked to your public engagement activities. 	
ERC Project Number	951542	
ERC Project Acronym 	GENIE	
ERC Project Title 	GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions pathways in Europe 	

The ERCEA may occasionally contact Principal Investigators who applied for this award, even those who did not win, to present their public engagement in communication activities, speak in national and international forums, etc. Do you consent to the ERCEA staff contacting you for such purposes? Please note that your reply will have no impact on the evaluation of your application.	
Yes	

TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPLICATION FORM (PART B)
1. SUMMARY
2. DETAILED DESCRIPTION
3. OTHER
3.1 Ethics
3.2 Security
4. DECLARATIONS

1. SUMMARY
Summary (max 2000 characters)
Provide an overall description of your prize application. This summary should give readers a clear idea of what it is about. It should be written as a stand-alone text. 
!!! Please use the same text here and in Part A online forms (Abstract) !!!	
The GENIE (“GeoEngineering and Negative Emission Pathways in Europe”) project provides an urgently needed, balanced, rigorous, and interdisciplinary understanding of carbon removal/negative emissions and geoengineering technologies.  Tackling climate change is a wicked policy problem that pervades in all areas of society. For this reason, GENIE is deeply interdisciplinary and public facing, rooted in a research design centered on public inclusion, transparency, and co-creation. It has multiple mechanisms of public engagement designed for the systematic exploration of the interrelated techno-economic, socio-technical and political-action systems that underpin the potential role of carbon removal and geoengineering in the fight against global warming.
The scope of climate interventions GENIE covers is inherently broad. It encompasses nature-based climate interventions such as forestry and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, biochar, and ecosystem restoration, as well as engineering-based approaches such as direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and enhanced rock weathering. It also includes forms of solar radiation management such as stratospheric aerosol injection, cloud thinning and brightening, and even placing sunshades or reflects in the upper atmosphere or outer space. 
Because these options are controversial and lack both public understanding and a social license to operate, GENIE includes an important assessment of the ethical, social justice, and public legitimacy implications of deployment. It has involved (1) extensive public engagement via directly involving the members of the public in surveys and focus groups, (2) created tools for the public to use (the SHARD and HATCH databases, an interactive GENIE Knowledge Portal including stories, a scenarios to explorer), and (3) tools for the media, private sector, practitioners and local and national policymakers (including youth and climate negotiators) through various activities and the creation of the State of CDR annual report, which includes a policy database.	

2. DETAILED DESCRIPTION 
Please describe how you meet the award criteria set out in the Rules of Contest and listed below. Focus on facts. You may include up to three hyperlinks as evidence of the public engagement activity. Evaluators will not consider as evidence any additional hyperlinks. Do not use hyperlinks to describe how the award criteria are met. 
Award criterion 1 – STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION (50%)
Quality of the public engagement strategy and its implementation. Relevance of the used tools, channels, resources and the implementation to the objectives and audience of the action. Degree of novelty or creativity of the approach.

Describe the strategy that you developed for your public engagement activity (please reply to each question). 
1.	What did you want to achieve? 
2.	Who was the target audience? 
3.	Describe the resources that you used to implement your activity.
4.	Which tools or channels did you use and why? 
5.	How did you implement your public engagement strategy (description of the completed implementation plan)?
.	
GENIE broadly seeks to achieve the improvement of public understanding and acceptability of a broad spectrum of carbon removal/negative emissions technologies options, their risks, co-benefits and trade-offs; the foregrounding of justice, ethics and lived experiences from the Global South that are often very different from those in Europe and North America; the creation of channels for publics to challenge, refine and contextualize our research findings; and the building of a longer-term, globally distributed community of practice around responsible governance and public acceptability of geo-engineering and carbon removal/negative emissions technologies.
In terms of our communication plan and our audience, GENIE seeks (1) to achieve an impact on the ethics and public acceptability of geoengineering and carbon removal/negative emissions technologies by including members of the public in its research, (2) to inform local and national policymakers and members of civil society, and (3) to inform the mass media, business community and private sector, and (4) to inform youth.
Firstly, GENIE actively includes citizens in its research design. It conducted mixed-methods research to examine public perceptions at a global level. This consisted of a broad survey exercise and a series of focus groups to explore the attitudes and concerns towards emerging climate change technologies in the Global South and the Global North, one of the very first such exercises of its kind and the first at such a scale. The nationally representative surveys featured more than 30,000 respondents in 30 countries (and 19 languages), while there were also 44 focus groups in 22 countries (one urban, one rural in each), with more than 320 diverse participants involved.   After being anonymized and checked to ensure privacy protections, all survey responses have been published publicly here so that they are accessible to the global population. Our resulting analysis and findings both shaped public preferences (e.g., which pathways citizens find desirable), and directly pointed to specific actions (e.g., choosing more sustainable options) that citizens and other stakeholders can take to contribute towards more low-carbon livelihoods. 
Secondly, to inform the public but also key stakeholders including policymakers and members of civil society, GENIE has established a Knowledge Hub as the place to go for climate intervention related information. The GENIE Knowledge Hub includes three types of tools: (1) Scenario portals, (2) Technology databases and (3) Infographics and interactive maps. Moreover, the Knowledge Hub features a series of press releases, blogs, and policy briefs, written for a general audience. The Knowledge Hub has served multiple purposes, providing full transparency and open access to the GENIE outputs (such as new methodologies, tools, and original datasets) but also featuring a number of interactive web-based tools in order to support exploitation and tailor-made communication of the GENIE insights to diverse audiences (including local politicians, policy analysts, businesses, and the public). It informs stakeholders, city representatives, and regional authorities about decarbonization scenarios, the possibilities of sharing the efforts between sectors and countries, and the ways of mitigating risks and maximizing benefits for the national and local economy, industry and jobs.  All tools of these tools have been co-designed with the GENIE stakeholders, enhancing their usefulness, comprehensibility, and trustworthiness.
In addition to the Knowledge Hub, GENIE researchers have coordinated the flagship, open access and fully available publication of “The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal”. This report fills an important gap in global climate change assessments: the need for a balanced, independent, and rigorous synthesis of the current science on carbon dioxide removal. The report is authored by dozens of global CDR experts and has chapters on research and innovation, demonstration and upscaling, markets, policy making, public perceptions, current deployment, Paris consistent CDR requirements, the CDR gap, and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV). Important contributions are to provide an up-to-date estimate of current CDR deployments, an evaluation of the “CDR gap” (the measure of difference between country proposals to deploy CDR versus Paris consistent requirements), and to evaluate the state of CDR technology development and readiness. This all has immense value for local, national, and regional energy and climate policymakers as well as the media. 
Thirdly, GENIE has sought to further inform the mass media and private sector (especially business and market analysts) by developing both the Systematic Historical Analogue Research for Decision-making (SHARD) approach, a new methodology for using historical case studies to inform low-carbon transitions, and the HATCH dataset.  GENIE has applied the SHARD methodology in a series of papers on specific CDR technologies, including biochar, direct air capture, co2 pipelines and others in development.  GENIE has also built the Historical Adoption of Technologies (HATCH) dataset, which covers the adoption of hundreds of diverse technologies across hundreds of countries over time.  
Fourthly, GENIE has actively presented its research directly to the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, a subsidiary body of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) that provides advice on scientific, technological, and methodological matters related to climate change. It assesses the scientific knowledge of climate change, identifies and promotes the transfer of technology, and answers scientific questions from the COP and its other subsidiary bodies. GENIE work has been presented at SBSTA in the past two years (targeting negotiators and NGOs/youth representatives in particular), so that we can show that we were engaging with many different types of audiences and through different media. At SBSTA on 5 June 2024, during a full-day stakeholder workshop held together with the ELEVATE project partners, we discussed the “Governance of Carbon Dioxide Removal”. Around 40 participants – including negotiators, NGO representatives and youth delegates – were presented with climate mitigation scenarios with and without CDR technologies and asked to reflect on which technologies might play a greater role in mitigation and how they should be governed (for example, via a single carbon market or through separate removal credits). Similar questions were revisited on 20 June 2025 in a smaller stakeholder workshop (around 15 participants).
GENIE work was also presented at the Long Night of Science (Lange Nacht der Forschung) in April 2024. We presented GENIE content in several forms to make it accessible to a wide audience so that they would understand the fundamental concepts (what is CDR, why might we need it?) and the various options. Engagement approaches were very playful: Art-based creation of future visions, LEGO-based introduction to carbon sources and removal technologies and a video game where they engage with the need to act as well as a variety of options to tackle the crisis. More than 200 youths and parents engaged with our booth.
GENIE investigators have also given direct and invited oral testimony about geoengineering or negative emissions technology and policy to the Canadian Senate, the UK Environmental Audit Committee, the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Supplementing these tasks, to accomplish the goals of reaching our audience, we adopted a hybrid, multi-channel strategy for maximum reach and depth:
•	International webinars: Used for broad, accessible dissemination. They allowed us to present comparative data (e.g., "Our data shows 60% support for DAC research in the Global South vs. 44% in the Global North") and host live Q&A sessions with global scientists and members of the public, fostering a global conversation.
•	In-Person seminars (e.g., at KAPSARC – Riyadh, Delhi India, or in Beijing at Renmin University of China): Chosen for depth and relationship-building. The physical presence of GENIE investigators demonstrated respect and commitment. These sessions featured interactive workshops, allowing for nuanced discussions on topics like "Justice and Equity in CDR Deployment" specific to the Middle Eastern or Asian contexts. 
•	Targeted social media campaigns (@AarhusUni, @MCC_Berlin, @IIASA): Used to amplify key messages from the events, share recordings, and engage a wider digital audience.
We chose this blend to maximize accessibility, multilingual reach (especially English, Dutch, Arabic, and Chinese), and to bridge expert evidence with everyday experience.	
Award criterion 2 – IMPACT (50%) 
Quantitative and qualitative evidence demonstrating the achievement of public engagement objectives. Possible evidence of learning by the research team and/or the participating public on effective approaches to public engagement.

Describe the impact of your public engagement activity (please reply to each question).
1.	What were the benefits of the activity for you and for your audience? 
2.	Describe the qualitative evidence of the activity’s success in achieving its own public engagement objectives.
3.	Describe the quantitative evidence of the activity’s success in achieving its own public engagement objectives. 
4.	Were there lessons learnt by the research team and/or the public who engaged in the activity on how to successfully engage with the public? If yes, describe the evidence of learning. 
.	
GENIE’s work has significantly advanced the state of social science knowledge on climate interventions among our different audiences of the public/citizens, policymakers, the media, the private sector, and youth/climate negotiators.  The project was conceived on the principle that assessing new climate intervention technologies is not merely a technical endeavor, but a deeply socio-political one. Our core impact, therefore, lies in systematically bridging the critical gap between cutting-edge scientific research and the societal, ethical, and governance imperatives required for their legitimate development and potential deployment.
A main finding from GENIE’s public surveys and focus groups is that publics in the Global South are generally more supportive of the cutting-edge methods to tackle climate change than their Global Northern counterparts.  This represents a significant advance in the mapping of attitudes towards the technologies that are currently receiving massive attention in the scientific community, setting a global baseline to orient ongoing discussions involving publics, experts, and policymakers. It stands out as the first piece of research to encompass respondents from all continents. Additionally, it is pioneering in its attempt to examine perceptions across the entire spectrum of methods, ranging from stratospheric aerosol injection to afforestation and direct air capture with storage.  To further facilitate broad engagement and investigation with this research, the full survey dataset has now been made available online and through the GENIE Knowledge Hub.
GENIE has moved the global conversation forward by generating the world's first comprehensive, comparative dataset on public perceptions of both geoengineering and negative emission technologies across the Global North and South. This has challenged previous assumptions, revealing, for instance, that populations in the Global South are generally more supportive of these technologies, but also harbor distinct concerns about power imbalances and justice. As evidence of high-level endorsement of our findings, a senior official from the Saudi Green Initiative stated: "This is the kind of frank, evidence-based dialogue we need. It challenges us to think not just about can we do it, but how we should do it justly." Quotes from participant feedback forms included remarks such as "Finally, a European project that doesn't just talk at us, but with us," and "The session on public perceptions made me realize the critical importance of communication alongside innovation."
Beyond perception studies, GENIE has produced tangible tools for the global community, such as the open-access GENIE CDR Knowledge Hub and the Historical Adoption of TeCHnology (HATCH) dataset, which provide vital resources for policymakers and researchers.  The HATCH page has been viewed 4.922 times and the dataset downloaded about 2000 times.  The other versions of the HATCH dataset that are extended (with national level data, technology characteristics, country-level indicators) are featured in papers that are currently in peer review. The Knowledge Hub has already recorded a total of 4,392 visitors, 2,109 in 2024 and 2,285 (so far) in 2025.  Furthermore, our justice-centered analyses have provided a critical framework for evaluating the potential burdens and benefits of these technologies across their entire lifecycle, ensuring that equity is at the forefront of the debate.
The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report has been highly impactful: It is cited in policy documents of the European Commission and UK government. Across both editions, launch events drew over 1,000 attendees, the website has seen more than 130,000 visits, and the report received more than 600 media mentions globally. There have been 5800 YouTube views of the launch presentation, and people from 99 countries have visited the website stateofcdr.org.  Moreover, GENIE work has sparked collaboration with the City CDR Initiative, supporting global CDR in city planning. This also helped launch a research and practitioner network to contribute to the 2027 IPCC Special Report on Cities and advance analysis of CDR methods for the built environment.
Outreach and dissemination of results have been a final high-priority task for GENIE.  We have done extensive presentations, media interviews, and podcasts for all our work.  A sample of our mentions in the mass media include:
•	December 22, 2025, MIT Technology Review, “Welcome to Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change”
•	September 3, 2025, Financial Times, “Carbon capture set to be less useful in tackling climate change, scientists warn”
•	April 3, 2025, Science, “Geoengineering could be crucial in the fight against climate change. But first scientists need to learn how to talk to the public about it”
•	March 18, 2025, Anthropocene Magazine, “Huge new study exposes disparate climate emotions around the world—and their consequences”
•	March 17, 2025, Radio Canada, “Climate interventions and climate emotions”
•	February 16, 2025, Dagbladet, “Will we end up filling the sky with sulfur particles? Understanding geoengineering”
•	June 25, 2025, Forbes, “Do We Really Need Carbon Removal? 5 Insights From World’s Top Experts”
•	April 23, 2024, MIT Technology Review “Why new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided”
•	February 13, 2024, Environmental Politics, “Public perceptions of solar geoengineering activities in Mexico, the UK, and the US”
•	November 3, 2023, American Association for the Advancement of Science “Mother Nature knows best when it comes to climate solutions, social media users say”
•	April 17, 2023, MIT Technology Review, "This technology could alter the entire planet. These groups want every nation to have a say."
•	March 1, 2023, Time Magazine, "There's a bit of truth to some climate conspiracy theories. But that doesn't make them right"
•	February 8, 2023, Washington Post, "These researchers want to launch dust from the moon to help cool Earth"
•	January 27, 2023, Bloomberg News, "Carbon removal is where green investment should go"
•	January 23, 2023, The Economist, "Countries need to pull more carbon dioxide out of the air"
•	January 19, 2023, Nature, "Carbon capture nets 2 billion tonnes of CO2 each year — but it's not enough"
•	November 1, 2022, Reuters, “Can solar geoengineering stop global warming?”
•	July 28, 2022, Reviewer 2 Does Geoengineering [Podcast]
"Surveying experts' views - Sovacool" - listen to it via Anchor or Spotify
•	June 22, 2022, Wired Magazine, “The Nightmare Politics and Sticky Science of Hacking the Climate”
•	June 2, 2022, Reviewer 2 Does Geoengineering [Podcast], "Space mirrors: experts' views - Baum" - listen to it via Anchor or Spotify
•	May 3, 2022, Society for Risk Analysis, "Study weighs the risks of climate geoengineering
Lastly, we have learnt several important lessons that have already reshaped our engagement practice and communications plan:
•	Lesson 1: "Novelty" is region-specific. Technologies like Enhanced Weathering are novel in Europe but may have analogues in Middle Eastern agricultural practices; biochar has very different supply chain dimensions or cultural meaning in China and India compared to Italy or the UK. We are learning how to frame technologies within local contexts and histories.
•	Lesson 2: Trust is built in person. While webinars are efficient, the trust and candidness required for discussions on sensitive topics like geoengineering governance were disproportionately generated during the in-person seminars held at KAPSARC in Riyadh, Delhi India, or Renmin in Beijing, as well as in-person testimony given to the Canadian Senate, the UK Environmental Audit Committee, and the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. 
•	Lesson 3: The "Global South" is not a monolith. Our engagement with Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa highlighted the immense diversity within this category. Our future strategies will be even more tailored to sub-regional political and economic contexts. This learning is evidenced by our revised stakeholder mapping for WP8 (Impact and Engagement), which now includes more granular regional classifications.
Ultimately, GENIE's impact has been to provide a rigorous, interdisciplinary, and inclusive evidence base. We empower policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society to make informed decisions on whether, when, and how to integrate these controversial yet potentially necessary tools into the broader climate action portfolio, ensuring the path to a zero-emissions future is not only feasible but also just and socially robust.	

3. OTHER
3.1 Ethics 
Ethics 
Describe ethics issues linked to your application (if any) and the measures you took/intend to take to solve/avoid them. In the absence of any ethics issues, please indicate n/a.	
Because the project involved human research subjects for the surveys and focus groups, the project was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Aarhus University 2021-13 as well as by the Ethics Committee at the European Research Council.	

3.2 Security
Security 
Describe security issues linked to your application (if any) and the measures you took/intend to take to solve/avoid them.
Indicate if any of the information is/should be EU-classified (Decision 2015/444).
In the absence of any security issues, please indicate n/a.	
N/A	

4. DECLARATIONS 
Double funding	
Information concerning other prizes for this project 
 Please note that there is a strict prohibition of double funding from the EU budget (except under EU Synergies calls). Applications that have already received an EU prize cannot receive a second prize for the same activities 	
YES	
We confirm that to our best knowledge neither the application as a whole nor any parts of it have benefitted from any other EU prize. 	YES	
We confirm that to our best knowledge neither the application as a whole nor any parts of it are (nor will be) submitted for any other EU prize. 	YES	

HISTORY OF CHANGES	
VERSION	PUBLICATION  DATE	CHANGE	
1.0	10.09.2025	Initial version