Stories of soil and sea: Comparing narratives of land- and marine-based carbon dioxide removal for responsible deployment

Large-scale removal and storage of atmospheric CO 2 in land and ocean sinks is essential to meet Paris Agreement temperature goals, yet empirical evidence on how novel carbon dioxide removal (CDR) should be deployed responsibly remains limited. Using Australia as a case study, we provide one of the first empirical comparisons of stakeholder expectations for the responsible deployment of marine- and land-based CDR, comparing ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) and mineral carbonation (MC) to identify where governance priorities converge and where they diverge. Guided by responsible innovation and using Q methodology, we combined two rounds of interviews with a quantitative ranking exercise involving stakeholders across three Australian states. Stakeholders prioritised scientific rigour most strongly across both cases, including testing before scaling, monitoring, and verifiable storage, alongside safeguarding the natural environment, promoting procedural fairness, upholding distributive justice, and establishing risk governance. However, safeguarding community interests resonated less strongly for OAE than for MC, indicating that governance approaches should not assume equivalent social concerns across both domains. Stakeholder narratives encompass environmental, urgency-driven, procedural, and mitigation-oriented perspectives, highlighting the need for adaptive and plural governance approaches. Although climate urgency is widely recognised, procedural safeguards are viewed as either essential or constraining, creating governance tensions that must be carefully managed in local contexts. By examining the underlying narratives through which stakeholders make sense of risks, benefits, and responsibilities, we show why similar governance principles can be supported for different reasons and highlight the need for place-sensitive, method-specific policy design for novel CDR deployment.