Geoengineering – a term which is increasingly used to describe a number of technologies which have the potential to offset the global warming caused by greenhouse gases – raises many risk governance issues.
Some of these issues concern the technologies themselves, and their impacts. One is that there is no single geoengineering technique. For example, “solar shielding” (which may have a cooling effect on temperatures by using aerosol particles to prevent a proportion of the sun’s energy from reaching the Earth’s surface) cannot be directly compared with technologies intended to sequester CO2 from the air (such as Ocean Iron Fertilisation). Each technology would work differently, and have different impacts on such systems as the hydrological and carbon cycle.
Another set of issues derive from limited knowledge. Climate modelling is itself hugely complex and imprecise, and it is currently not possible to adequately model the effects of geoengineering technologies on not only the Earth’s climate but also other parts of the biosphere (such as hydrological, carbon and nitrogen cycles, Ocean Flux and ecosystems). To better understand each technology’s impacts, modelling will need to be complemented by physical experiments which, to be useful, themselves require considerable and costly enhancements to current climate monitoring systems.
The need for such research raises issues of how (under what norms) the research is conduct, by whom and under whose oversight. A number of international treaties include texts which have relevance to one or more of the technologies (for example, the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter is directly relevant to Ocean Iron Fertilisation) but even they are open to different interpretations and some technologies (building a giant refractor in the Lagrangian Point between Earth and the Sun) will require research well beyond the scope of current international law. It may be premature to introduce new legal frameworks for technologies that have yet to be tested, but there may well be a need to develop a transparent approach to ensuring the legitimacy and purpose of the necessary research.
Research is an essential prerequisite to a decision to actually deploy one or more of the technologies. Both research and deployment raise a risk of moral hazard. Whilst genuine progress has been made through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol, the scientific evidence (as in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report) indicates that far more rigorous measures are needed to reduce GHG emissions and their impact. These measures are known to be hugely expensive and their effect on global warming will be slow. Geoengineering could be seen by some as a potentially cheaper policy alternative. The moral hazard is that a decision to support geoengineering technologies could lessen efforts to reduce the global concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Even the proponents of geoengineering believe that to do so would be a mistake.
To help progress discussion of these issues, an expert workshop on this issue was held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal on 20 and 21 April 2009, and IRGC is planning a follow-up publication in 2010.
For more information about this project, please contact Ms Malin Samuelsson at malin.samuelsson@irgc.org