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Previous research points to leadership as a key ingredient in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. We adopt a polycentric perspective and use focus group interviews with Swedish actors within the business sector, politics, and government agencies, to analyse participants views on what it means to lead, preconditions of leadership, and division of responsibilities, in a context of transformative change. Our results suggest that participants focus on collective dimensions of leadership rather than front-running but see multiple ways of demonstrating climate leadership as being available to actors across governance levels and issue areas. Challenges to these views on leadership include the request for shared rules and regulations, and courage among leaders to enact coercive top-down leadership to handle conflicts and trade-offs. We conclude that polycentric transformative leadership is by default polysemic and will require multiple leadership roles at different scales changing over time. ; Funding Agencies|Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research-Mistra through the research programme Mistra Carbon Exit [2016/12, 6]; Swedish Research Council FormasSwedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council Formas [2016-00589]

Climate engineering (geoengineering) has been widely discussed as a potential instrument for curbing global warming if politics fails to deliver green house gas emission reductions. This debate has lost momentum over the last couple of years, but is now being renewed in the wake of the December 2015 Paris climate change agreement. Resurgent interest primarily stems from two elements of the Paris agreement. First, by defining the long term goal as "achiev[ing] a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" instead of decarbonization, the agreement can be interpreted as providing leeway for climate engineering proposals. Second, the agreement formulated a temperature goal of "well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C". In response, several scientists argued that these goals may require climate engineering. As these discussions will affect the forthcoming review of pathways toward 1.5°C warming, this policy brief takes stock of climate engineering. It draws on the expertise of Linköping University's Climate Engineering (LUCE) interdisciplinary research programme. The brief provides an overview of the status of academic debate on climate engineering regarding bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS); stratospheric aerosol injection; and mass media reporting and public engagement.