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Climate Engineering the Way Forward? Environmental Development 2 (2012) 57–72 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Environmental Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envdev Climate engineering: The way forward? Aaron Welch, Sarah Gaines n, Tony Marjoram 1, Luciano Fonseca 2 UNESCO, Natural Sciences Sector, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France article info abstract The deliberate large-scale manipulation of the climate is increas- Keywords: ingly being discussed as a potential tool to ensure the basic Geoengineering condition for a sustainable future: a habitable climate. While far Climate engineering from the ideal solution, the rate of climate change continues to Climate change outpace our attempts at a response, prompting some scientists Earth system and politicians to call for the consideration of climate engineering Solar radiation management or geoengineering to avoid catastrophic climate change, while Carbon dioxide removal political processes to reduce greenhouse gases catch up. A Governance November 2010 expert meeting was held at UNESCO to raise awareness of geoengineering, its potential to counteract climate change and its risks, and to broaden the discussion within the international community. Potential geoengineering methods include solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal techniques that are largely theoretical and remain untested, despite a long history. Responsible research can only proceed, and informed decisions be made, once governance structures have been developed beyond mere principles insufficient to guide researchers and policy makers. At the same time, realistic communication on these activities must increase and improve so that civil society can play a role in determining acceptable levels and types of human intervention. Appropriate geoengineer- ing research should be considered for solar geoengineering methods that promise to quickly and affordably decrease global mean temperature, and for carbon geoengineering methods that target the core problem of climate change by directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A small cadre of scientists and policy makers has advanced the discussion of geoengineering and its likely impacts, but the path to a sustainable future cannot n Corresponding author. Tel.: þ33 1 45 68 40 71; fax: þ33 1 45 68 58 04. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A. Welch), [email protected] (S. Gaines), [email protected] (T. Marjoram), [email protected] (L. Fonseca). 1 Formerly responsible for the engineering sciences programme at UNESCO, presently based in Melbourne, Australia, with interests in engineering, technology and development. 2 Present address: University of Brasilia, Brazil. 2211-4645/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.envdev.2012.02.001 58 A. Welch et al. / Environmental Development 2 (2012) 57–72 be charted until the wider international community asks some fundamental questions about what kind of regulation is appro- priate, how it should be implemented and by whom and at what cost. This task is urgent, and only by raising awareness of geoengineering can we secure the participation of the interna- tional community in developing governance structures and ensuring that responsible research on geoengineering proceeds in a timely and consensual manner. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Previously the stuff of science fiction, man-made techniques to engineer climate are increasingly being discussed as a necessary tool in the pathway to a sustainable future. In most cases, climate engineering is proposed as an additional technique to cool the climate in a climate emergency, not as a replacement to the necessary reduction in greenhouse gases. While these debates carry on in the halls of Parliament and at academic meetings in the West, the majority of the world’s population remains unaware of the emerging subject although they are just as dependent on the climate system and more vulnerable to any engineered perturbations. This paper focuses attention on this trend in order to engage a wider international community and suggest a participative way forward. This paper is an extension of UNESCO’s involvement in the geoengineering discussion that began when the first UNESCO expert meeting on the subject was hosted in November 2010. To further raise international awareness, a UNESCO–SCOPE–UNEP Policy Brief explaining the state of research questions and policy implications of climate engineering was published in November 2011. In the organization’s role as an ‘honest broker’, UNESCO recognizes that geoengineering is a field with global impacts that demands an informed and engaged international scientific, policy, and civil society community. In this spirit, UNESCO has initiated a critical discussion of the efficacy of geoengineering, its possible benefits and potential for harm, and the status of both the science and governance of this rapidly evolving field. The organization’s involvement does not represent an endorsement of any geoengineering activity and the authors of this paper write in their personal capacities in order to contribute to this debate. 1.1. Definitions Geoengineering is the deliberate large-scale manipulation of environmental processes that affect the Earth’s climate with the intent to counteract the effects of global warming. The term ‘geoengineering’ was originally coined to describe a theoretical mechanism utilizing ocean currents to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (Marchetti, 1977). Since its first use a generation ago, the term has been expanded to apply to a suite of proposals that intentionally manipulate the Earth’s climate in an attempt to counter human-induced change, but does not include activities for which the climatic impact is a side-effect or unintended consequence. By design, geoengineering proposals have the potential for international impact. Similar alternative terms such as ‘climate engineering’ are also sometimes used for clarity’s sake, but in accordance with the dominant usage, the term geoengineering is predominantly used in this paper. The suite of proposed interventions range from ocean fertilization to extensive tree planting to favoring lighter more reflective crops to large-scale cloud seeding, exist at various degrees of modeling and experimental testing and carry uncertain consequences. Geoengineering is being considered alongside adaptation and mitigation in response to the threat of climate change. Increasingly, geoengineering is taken seriously as a reaction to concerns that the Earth’s climate is changing more rapidly than previously observed or estimated, and since there has neither been enough progress towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions nor evidence that A. Welch et al. / Environmental Development 2 (2012) 57–72 59 mitigation and adaptation measures now proposed are sufficient to avoid unfavorable, even catastrophic, climate change in the future. Often, geoengineering is proposed as an emergency stop- gap to prevent the climate from passing critical tipping points of change, while adaptation and mitigation policies take effect. 1.2. History The modern conceptualization of geoengineering derives from more than a century of the application of technology to the weather, and predates the current focus on climate change (Fleming, 2010). Keith (2000) presents a twentieth-century history of geoengineering that more fully describes this arc, but for the purposes of this paper, geoengineering is understood to have passed through three important phases beginning after World War II. Geoengineering was shaped by (1) the Cold War race to control weather, (2) the rise of environmentalism and the focus on climate change, and (3) a twenty-first century renaissance spurred by the apparent failure of mitigation efforts. This controversial field of research has grabbed recent headlines over some of its more outlandish proposals, but is a legitimate scientific concern with a long history and is worthy of further inquiry. 1.2.1. Cold War weather makers Measures to control rainfall were advanced in the early years of the Cold War by competition between the USSR and US to establish a strategic supremacy in weather modification. Despite focusing on some of the same techniques – namely cloud seeding – the two nations arrived at a concern for climate change from separate corners. The USSR began cloud seeding field experiments before the war and expressed, in the 1950s and 1960s, an overt desire to control climate (Zikeev and Doumani, 1967). The Soviets were first to conceive of solar radiation management by injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere (Budyko, 1977). Soviet investigations of climate modification would persist throughout the Cold War, while in the US, a burgeoning weather modification industry dominated any concern for climate until CO2-induced climate change was first identified as a threat in a seminal 1965 climate assessment by President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee (Keith, 2000). The report assessed the impact of global fossil fuel combustion on atmospheric CO2 concentration in order to estimate rises in the planet’s temperature (President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), 1965)). Although dismissed by the President, the only response to a warming climate presented in the assessment was a geoengineering scheme to increase the albedo of the sea surface. 1.2.2. Rise of environmentalism and the focus on the climate problem The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a marked shift away from the type of thinking that allowed geoengineering
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