About

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University, serving as a Professor of Law and co-Director of the Center on Risk in the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. He is also a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy, a professor at Duke Kunshan University, and a professor in the Division of Environmental Social Systems. His roles indicate a focus on law, public policy, and environmental social systems, with an emphasis on risk and science policy. Wiener is associated with the Duke Initiative for Science & Society, highlighting his engagement in interdisciplinary approaches to science, policy, and law. His contact information is provided through Duke Law School, and he is based in Durham, North Carolina.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Environmental science
• Ecology
• Public administration
• Biology
• Business
• Engineering ethics
• Finance
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Internet privacy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Practical paths to risk-risk analysis of solar radiation modification

  Oxford Open Climate Change · 2025-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Solar radiation modification (SRM) is increasingly discussed as a potential strategy—in addition to ongoing greenhouse gas emission reduction, carbon dioxide removal, and adaptation—for reducing climate change risks. SRM, in particular stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), could cool the earth, reducing many of the adverse impacts of rising global temperature; but it could also have unintended consequences both positive and negative, and both biophysical and societal. Because the potential benefits and harms of each SRM option are multiple and uncertain, they need to be analyzed using a comprehensive framework that compares the risks of courses of action that include SRM against those that do not, where the definition of risk captures both the severity and likelihood of impacts. Here we outline such a risk-risk framework for SRM with a specific application to SAI. Four practical steps are needed to perform a risk-risk analysis: (i) specify the candidate risk reduction action(s) to be analyzed, (ii) catalog all important potential benefits and harms of each candidate action, (iii) define the events that constitute the risks of harms and less-than-expected benefits, and estimate their likelihood, magnitude, timing, distribution, and other relevant dimensions, including uncertainty about these estimates, and (iv) compare the risks across different candidate risk reduction actions with the aim of informing decisions that reduce overall risk. We perform an initial cataloging, estimation, and comparison of important risks of a specified SAI deployment in comparison to a non-SAI scenario. We also suggest ways to overcome some key challenges to applying the risk-risk framework across a broad array of possible actions, impacts, and scenarios. We recommend an international assessment of SRM options and their risk-risk profiles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The International Risk Governance Council: Reflections on a 20‐Year Experiment in Support of Improved Risk Governance

  Risk Analysis · 2025-10-05

  articleOpen access

  The International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) was a nonprofit foundation, based first as an independent, freestanding Swiss foundation in Geneva from 2003 to 2012, and then affiliated with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne from 2012 to 2023. IRGC's mission was to identify and improve the governance of emerging and systemic risks that have, or could have, impacts on human and environmental health, the economy and society, and overall sustainability. In this paper, we recount IRGC's history, describe its many reports, workshops, and conference activities (including tables referencing the many published products), and provide six brief case histories of accomplishments and insights on work IRGC has done on solar radiation management, small modular reactors, synthetic biology, autonomous vehicles, resilience and systemic risks, and international comparison of risk governance. The paper concludes with some brief observations about the impact of IRGC's work and notes the continuing need for a neutral convening entity that can perform a role similar to that of IRGC.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Practical Paths to Risk-Risk Analysis of Solar Radiation Modification

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Multi-Risk Governance of Solar Radiation Modification

  European Journal of Risk Regulation · 2025-07-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Solar radiation modification (SRM) presents important challenges to risk regulation and governance, arising from the array of multiple risks that SRM may influence. SRM would not simply reverse climate change, but could pose further ancillary impacts, depending on the method of SRM, such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), marine cloud brightening (MCB), or a space-based planetary sunshade system (PSS). We identify multiple risks that SRM may influence, both biophysical and sociopolitical, to be compared to the multiple risks that may be affected by greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation and climate adaptation. This multi-risk framework helps analysts and decision makers identify, evaluate, and compare multiple risks holistically; helps identify affected groups to overcome problems of disregard and omitted voice; helps compare policy options and map the array of risks to corresponding (or missing) governance mechanisms; and seeks risk-superior policies that would reduce multiple risks in concert. We then examine governance frameworks: uncoordinated, coordinated and comprehensive. We suggest two key mechanisms that can help build up from uncoordinated toward more coordinated or even comprehensive approaches, and that can gain support from SRM advocates, observers and critics alike: a series of international assessments of SRM, and a transparent international monitoring system for SRM.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Evolving International Climate Change Regime: Mitigation, Adaptation, Reflection

  Texas A&M Law Review · 2024-05-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The complex international regime for climate change has evolved over the past three decades, from the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol through the Paris Agreement and beyond. We assess this evolution from the 1990s to the 2020s, and its potential future evolution from the 2020s to the 2050s, across three main policy strategies: mitigation, adaptation, and reflection. In its first three decades, the regime has focused predominantly on the mitigation of net emissions and on engaging all major emitting countries in that effort. More recently, as progress on mitigation has been slow and as the impacts of climate change have risen around the world, the regime has begun to address adaptation. The next three decades may see the rise of a third strategy, reflection, if actors (collectively or unilaterally) perceive an urgent need to alleviate peak climate damages through fast-acting but controversial and risky climate interventions known as sunlight reflection methods or solar radiation modification (SRM). Several major international groups have recently issued reports on SRM, yet the international climate change regime has not yet constructed a governance regime for assessment or management of SRM. We recommend and outline comprehensive risk-risk tradeoff analyses of SRM to help avoid harmful countervailing risks. We suggest the development of an adaptive governance regime, starting early and embracing iterative and inclusive learning and updating over time. We urge that among the first key steps should be the development of a transparent international monitoring system for SRM. Such a monitoring system could provide early warning and help deter any unilateral SRM, assess the intended and unintended global and regional impacts of any research or eventual deployment of SRM, foster collective deliberation and reduce the risk of international conflict over SRM, help attribute adverse side effects of SRM to assist those adversely affected, and aid learning to improve the system adaptively over time. Thus, any reflection (of sunlight) should involve ongoing reflection (analysis and revision). Such an SRM monitoring regime is needed before SRM might be deployed, and can be developed at the same time that the focus of current efforts remains on mitigation and adaptation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving risk governance strategies via learning: a comparative analysis of solar radiation modification and gene drives

  Environment Systems & Decisions · 2024-06-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and gene drive organisms (GDOs) have been proposed as technological responses to complex entrenched environmental challenges. They also share several characteristics of emerging risks, including extensive uncertainties, systemic interdependencies, and risk profiles intertwined with societal contexts. This Perspective conducts a comparative analysis of the two technologies, and identifies ways in which their research and policy communities may learn from each other to inform future risk governance strategies. We find that SAI and GDOs share common features of aiming to improve or restore a public good, are characterized by numerous potential ecological, societal, and ethical risks associated with deep uncertainty, and are challenged by how best to coordinate behavior of different actors. Meanwhile, SAI and GDOs differ in their temporal and spatial mode of deployment, spread, degree and type of reversibility, and potential for environmental monitoring. Based on this analysis, we find the field of SAI may learn from GDOs by enhancing its international collaborations for governance and oversight, while the field of GDOs may learn from SAI by investing in research focused on economics and decision-modeling. Additionally, given the relatively early development stages of SAI and GDOs, there may be ample opportunities to learn from risk governance efforts of other emerging technologies, including the need for improved monitoring and incorporating aspects of responsible innovation in research and any deployment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Co‐Benefits, Countervailing Risks, and Cost–Benefit Analysis

  2024-04-05 · 3 citations

  otherSenior author

  The United States has developed a strong system of impact assessment for federal regulatory policies, including attention to both their benefits and costs. The supporting regulatory impact assessments focus largely on the extent to which the regulatory alternatives are likely to achieve goals in a cost-benefit analysis. Critics have questioned the estimated magnitude, policy propriety, and legal basis of counting co-benefits. This chapter examines the controversy that co-benefits are overstated, or that other countervailing risks and costs are neglected. It argues in favor of counting the full portfolio or scope of important policy impacts, both benefits and harms. The chapter examines the treatment of ancillary impacts in case studies that address environmental policies under the Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations. It advocates estimating the full scope of important impacts to the extent caused by the policy option, and to the extent relevant to improving the policy process and decision.

  PublisherDOI

• Mediastinal Non-Tuberculous Mycobacterial Infection in Children - A Multidisciplinary Approach

  Research Square · 2023-08-24

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Mediastinal infections due to non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) remain an exceedingly rare entity. Most cases in the published literature do not include paediatric patients. Due to their clinical infrequency, poor response to antimicrobial therapy and often precarious anatomical location, the treatment of these lesions presents a challenge. We present four cases of mediastinal NTM infection treated successfully by a multi-disciplinary team approach within a tertiary paediatric centre. All four children had extensive evaluation and ultimately had their disease debulked via thoracotomy in addition to prolonged anti-mycobacterial therapy, with successful clinical outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• IMPORTANCE OF EARLY BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS

  2022-09-19

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comparing Environmental Risk Regulations in China and the United States

  Risk Analysis · 2021-08-13 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  The relative stringency of risk regulation across countries may have significant implications for public health and environmental outcomes, as well as for economic and trade impacts. In this study, we build on prior literature-which has often employed qualitative case studies, and has often focused on comparing the United States and Europe-by using a quantitative evidential reasoning approach to compare the relative stringency of federal/central level written rules for 45 randomly selected environmental risks in the United States and China. We find that, on average, in this sample of 45 environmental risks, the written rules for environmental risk regulation were more stringent in the United States than in China. Within this sample, we find that relative stringency was selective, leaning in both directions, as the United States and China each regulated some risks more stringently than the other; for example, the US written rules were more stringent for risks of toxic chemicals and most air pollutants, whereas China's written rules were more stringent for risks in agriculture. We also observe nuanced differences in relative regulatory stringency within sectors and risks; even where one country regulated one risk more stringently, the other country may regulate certain aspects of that risk more stringently. We comment on possible explanations for the patterns we observe. Our methods and findings may contribute to better understanding of comparative risk regulation across the United States and China, and worldwide. We also recognize that in addition to the written rules studied here, countries may also vary in their implementation.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph E. Aldy

  14 shared

• Jessica Stern

  University of Rochester

  12 shared

• Richard B. Stewart

  Southern Cross University

  11 shared

• Wake Smith

  6 shared

• John D. Graham

  6 shared

• Juan Moreno‐Cruz

  University of Waterloo

  6 shared

• William A. Pizer

  6 shared

• Brendon Swedlow

  Northern Illinois University

  6 shared