mCDR Workshop Series
CSPO has continued its work on the NSF-funded workshop series Building Informed and Involved Communities for Responsible Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal.
Over November 12 & 13, the CSPO team convened its first workshop in Washington DC at the American Geophysical Union Conference Center. This first workshop brought together 28 mCDR science and technology experts, stakeholders, and rightsholders from 19 organizations, to discuss the technical and social challenges facing mCDR development now and into the next 10 years. Based on workshop discussions and work boards, participant groups identified eight high-priority challenges for mCDR development.
Over February 3 and 4, the CSPO team convened the second workshop online to allow broader participation. This second workshop brought together 25 participants from geological sciences, community engagement, social science, science policy, and climate justice to imagine solution landscapes for the challenges identified in the first workshop. The preliminary results of the workshop will be discussed in a Town Hall conversation at the American Geophysical Union Ocean Science Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
In late Spring, the results and outcomes of the workshops, including recommendations for collective and coordinated actions, will be synthesized in a final report and disseminated widely through different channels, formats, and platforms accessible to target mCDR stakeholders in public, private, philanthropic, and non-governmental organizations.
America@ 250: Redesigning the Scientific Enterprise
CSPO has officially launched America@ 250: Redesigning the Scientific Enterprise, a national initiative to address declining public trust, weakened science advisory capacity, and growing tensions over the goals, governance, and purpose of publicly-funded science. Responses to this moment have fragmented into three broad currents: efforts to restore the status quo, reforms to accelerate commercialization, and emerging calls for deeper systemic redesign. Yet these efforts largely proceed without sustained historical analysis, deliberative public engagement, or coordination across initiatives. CSPO’s America@ 250 project moves beyond institutional preservation or incremental reform toward a participatory, historically grounded redesign of the U.S. scientific enterprise.
To learn more about the America@ 250 project visit us in the ASU Avenue booth at the AAAS Annual meeting at 3:30pm on Friday, February 13th: https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2026/meetingapp.cgi/Session/37737 or visit
our website: https://cspo.org/research/america250/.
Public Interest Communications Summer Institute
Nich Weller and Jennifer Richter are headed to the 2026 Public Interest Communications Summer Institute from May 19-21 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
This year’s theme, “Belonging in Action: Public Interest Communications for a Divided World,” perfectly captures the spirit of CSPO’s participatory technology assessment (pTA) projects, especially the recent 3CAZ dialogues and discussions on collaborative-based storage of spent nuclear fuel that took place this summer across Arizona.
Jennifer and Nich’s session “Collaborating With Communities, For Communities – Engaging Publics in Participatory Decision Making on Science and Technology Issues” will explore how a team of academics – including experts from CSPO – is working with the federal government to build capacity to ensure that the American public has a voice in nuclear waste management decisions that will affect their communities.
