Perceptions of CO2 Report - Global CCS Institute

7.2.4 AWARENESS AND PERCEPTIONS OF CCSAfter the measures of CO 2 impressions and the introductory text about CCS, respondents wereasked whether they had heard about CCS before receiving this information. About a half (53%) ofall respondents had not, and one quarter of the remaining respondents (47%) answered that theyhad heard of it but did not really know what it is. Twenty per cent responded “I have heard about itand I know a little about it”, and only 5% responded “I have heard about it and I know a lot aboutit.”The Netherlands showed the greatest awareness of CCS among the three countries, as 64% ofrespondents had heard about CCS to some extent. The quantitative results corresponded with theinterview data, which showed that interviewees in the Netherlands had greater awareness of CCSthan those in Australia or Japan. Japan had the lowest awareness of CCS, with only 35% of theJapanese survey respondents indicating that they had heard about it. In Australia, 40% of thesurvey respondents had heard about CCS; and 2.3% indicated that they knew a lot about it, whichwas comparable to the result in the Netherlands. Results also showed that awareness does notdirectly imply knowledge, as in all cases approximately one quarter of respondents indicatedhaving heard about CCS, but not really knowing what it is.A series of questions was asked on how likely participants believed various CCS consequences tobe. Another series of questions addressed beliefs relating to CO₂’s effects in CCS. Analysis wasconducted to determine how misunderstandings of CO 2 ’s behaviour in CCS are affected bymisunderstandings of CO 2 and by information provision. Results are shown in Table 12 inAppendix F. Almost all misperceptions about CO 2 were found to be correlated to misperceptionsabout CCS. It was found that respondents’ level of misunderstanding of CO 2 was related to howrisky they perceived CCS to be.The following table summarizes results from regression analyses comparing participants’misunderstandings of CO 2 to their knowledge of CCS, where a higher knowledge score means abetter understanding of CCS. All variables describing misunderstandings of CO 2 were negativelycorrelated to the participant’s CCS knowledge score, and all variables describing correctunderstandings of CO 2 were positively correlated to CCS knowledge score.28 | Understanding how individuals perceive carbon dioxide