Study: Naturalness catalyzes public support for carbon dioxide removal and low-carbon energy technologies (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03829-w)
Public support for climate solutions isn't just about whether the technique works-it's also about whether people perceive it as a natural process.
That key takeaway of research from the University of Michigan and other institutions offers big implications for how policymakers, scientists and communicators talk about new climate technologies-and how much the public buys into each approach.
Research published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment drew on two studies examining how "naturalness" shapes public support for six carbon dioxide removal and four low-carbon energy technologies. To the degree that participants perceived technologies as more natural, they supported them more and judged them as less risky and frightening than those deemed artificial.
Approaches such as tree planting, soil carbon storage and solar energy garner more public support because they are perceived as closer to nature. More industrial-sounding technologies like direct-air capture or nuclear energy come off as more artificial and less appealing.
The findings also offer something unexpected in the larger conversation about climate change: A lack of heavy political polarization in a topic normally rife with it.
"One thing that continues to surprise me is how little political beliefs matter when it comes to people's preference for naturalness," said Kaitlin Raimi, a co-author and associate professor at U-M's Ford School of Public Policy. "In this and other work, we don't really find that people on the political left are more concerned about how natural things are or more concerned with tampering with nature despite the stereotypes people tend to hold about left-leaning 'crunchy' types."
To be sure, Raimi notes the idea of naturalness matters a great deal for whether people get behind energy and carbon technologies and the researchers find political beliefs predict support for those technologies. Still, she says, those two factors seem to work independently of one another.
"This is important, because so much of trying to win over the public when it comes to climate change falls along political lines," said Raimi, who, along with U-M colleagues, developed the Aversion to Tampering with Nature Scale to measure people's discomfort with tampering with the natural world.
"Our work shows that naturalness is a true bipartisan concern, and being attuned to the real and perceived impacts of technologies on the natural world is key to building public support for them."
Despite how important the natural aspect is for people's views on various technologies, that perception can shift simply based on how each is described.
For example, Raimi and her colleagues had participants read about direct air capture-a technology that would capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce the global warming impacts of that greenhouse gas.
In one condition, participants read about in terms of natural-sounding language, describing it as akin to plants and trees absorbing carbon dioxide through their leaves. In the other, direct-air capture was described as an industrial process where carbon dioxide is extracted from the atmosphere using synthetic filters.
"We found that for this and other technologies, framing them as working like a natural process made people feel it was safer, more beneficial and more acceptable," she said.
First author Sarah Gonzalez-Coffin said their research isn't advocating for greenwashing climate solutions. She believes communicators could lean into the genuine elements of technologies.
"We have incredible engineers and others working on developing technological solutions to climate change; the gridlock that we're running into is largely social," said Gonzalez-Coffin, who earned her doctorate in social psychology from University of Colorado and is now a postdoctoral research associate at University of Arizona's Lovejoy Center for Bridging Biodiversity, Conservation Science & Policy. "Our work brings that missing social component to illuminate the underlying psychology behind this gridlock."
Other collaborators on the study are Amanda Carrico and Leaf Van Boven, University of Colorado; Shahzeen Attari, University of Indiana; Holly Buck, University at Buffalo; Yoel Inbar, University of Toronto; Ezra Markowitz, University of Massachusetts; Jonathon Schuldt, Cornell University; and Trisha Shrum, University of Vermont.
