Conference Agenda

Solar geoengineering refers to a set of largely speculative future technologies that could be deployed to reflect some incoming solar radiation back into space, to counteract adverse consequences of climate change. The idea of solar geoengineering is much debated and remains highly contentious, even as these technologies are still at very early stages of conceptualization and development. This panel brings together papers that consider how solar geoengineering remains a highly contested concept, and how multiple understandings of future risk or benefit, as well as support for, or critique of, different solar geoengineering techniques manifest in practice. Three of the four papers explore growing contestations around solar geoengineering in diverse arenas, such as national and international governance regimes, small-scale experimentation, (rogue) commercial uptake, public engagement exercises, or within institutions of higher learning, such as universities. Another paper explores existing prohibitory regimes in international law and governance – which restrict use of potentially risky or dangerous technologies or activities – to learn lessons for the design of a restrictive global governance regime for solar geoeingineeing. Taken together, the panel offers a timely assessment of persisting contestations around solar geoengineering as these manifest within diverse arenas of discourse and practice. The panel fits within the conference stream on anticipation and imagination, with the papers illustrating how the diverse processes and arenas wherein claims of future risk or benefit from solar geoengineering are anticipated and acted upon are sites of contested climate politics.

Concerns over climate vulnerability and the insufficient pace of emissions reductions are prompting interest in novel climate-intervention solutions. Research, development, even deployment is thus being undertaken with emerging technologies such as carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering. To this point, the latter has been more tentative and controversial. There is the sense, though, that things are potentially accelerating, specifically around stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). Notably, a trial in northern Sweden of a balloon, led by Harvard University, was indefinitely postponed after criticism that it would have taken place on indigenous Sámi lands, without their approval. Furthermore, at the end of 2022, it came to public attention that a small Silicon Valley start-up had released trial balloons in Mexico, without government authorization. After becoming aware of the unauthorized trials, the Mexican government banned future solar geoengineering experiments, the first to do so. How SAI development and deployment should be handled, the proper governance approach, and what the public (or publics) think all remain open questions. While some researchers and civil-society members have called for a broad moratorium, others are pushing for a framework more conducive to testing and trials, albeit within limits and with oversight. Furthermore, in the wake of the first-ever SAI trials, which were coupled with attempts to sell “cooling credits”, it has been asked how such “rogue” activities might broadly affect perceptions of SAI. Accordingly, the current article employs an information-framing design to explore how permutations of SAI deployment might affect public perceptions. Focusing on two countries (Mexico and United States) at the core of recent events, with a nationally representative sample of 1000 participants from each, we employ a 2x2x2x1 design that examines the role of location (Mexico, United States), the actor involved (university, start-up) and scale and purpose (small-scale test with single balloon for research purposes, large-scale with hundreds of balloons and intent to commercialize). By looking at how overall support for SAI, perceptions of risks and benefits, and preference for specific policies vary depending on the information presented, we provide insights for understanding public perceptions and governance approaches. To this end, we also examine the role of potential covariates including beliefs about mitigation, aversion to tampering with nature, trust in institutions and science, and climate change perceptions.

Over the last decade, ‘geoengineering’ proposals to counteract global warming have started appearing on the agendas of national and international regulatory bodies. These proposals to deliberately intervene in the climatic system have caused much debate. Where some see an additional tool to mitigate dangerous global warming, others fear the advent of a democratically ungovernable techno-fix with unpredictable effects. Those tasked with developing governance mechanisms for geoengineering thus reliably find themselves confronted with the task of first defining what geoengineering is. We have seen this in the context of the London Convention, where substantial negotiation time was dedicated to establishing what conceptual boundaries the Protocol should draw. Similarly, the IPCC has engaged in a definitional exercise of geoengineering across several assessment reports, only to eventually discard the term entirely for its lack of precision. Still, geoengineering continues to lead a life in the political context, maintaining existence and traction as a legal term and as a way to distinguish what are considered ‘new’, ‘different’, or ‘dangerous’ approaches to addressing climate change. So what is geoengineering, then, and (how) does it become subject to governance? In this paper, we argue that in order to properly grasp geoengineering’s evolving status in climate policy, we need to study how the concept plays out in action. We thus ask: How does geoengineering enter arenas of governance and how do people engage with the concept in these settings? How do those tasked with developing governance contend and cope with this concept? And, finally, how does their engagement shape governance trajectories around geoengineering? To study geoengineering in action, we examine the conceptual disputes that have taken place in four powerful climate policy arenas: the United States Congress, the London Convention and Protocol, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Organisation for Standardisation. For each of these arenas, we identify an event that can be considered as the beginning of meaningful interaction with the concept of geoengineering. By contextualizing this event and analysing its implications, we trace when, why, and how actors engaged with the geoengineering concept and what effects this engagement had for its subsequent trajectory in this policy making arena. In doing so, we show not only how certain meanings are attributed to geoengineering, but also how actors cope with the ensuing contestation of these meanings.

As the adverse consequences of climate change become ever clearer, the potential future use of controversial solar geoengineering techniques is increasingly debated in expert and civil society fora, if not yet extensively in formal international policy processes. Solar geoengineering refers to a set of still speculative, and potentially highly risky, future technologies that would permit artificial interventions into the climate system, to reflect a part of the incoming sunlight back out to space, thereby providing a cooling effect. These interventions range from a possible brightening of marine clouds to increase their reflective capacity to the placement of mirrors in outer space. The most widely discussed option is the injection of reflective sulfur aerosol particles into the stratosphere from special aircraft or other means, to deflect some incoming sunlight. So far, solar geoengineering remains hypothetical, with no such technologies are currently developed or available for deployment. The potential future use of solar geoengineering poses, in our view, significant ecological, social and political risks. As such, we see a need to develop an anticipatory global governance regime that effectively prohibits use of solar geoengineering as a future climate policy option. Yet, how feasible is it to develop a global governance regime to prohibit future use of a potentially risky and speculative technology; and what might such a global governance regime look like? We address these questions here by examining and drawing lessons from existing prohibitory and restrictive regimes in international law and governance, with a view to learning lessons for the potential design of a global prohibitory regime on solar geoengineering. We examine international prohibitory or restrictive regimes dealing, inter alia, with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, weather modification technologies, anti-personnel landmines, substances that deplete the ozone layer, trade in hazardous wastes, and mining in Antarctic. We also include consideration of global regimes relating to fundamental human rights, such as prohibition of slavery and torture; and emerging norms and rules on the prohibition of human cloning; and other similar national, transnational or international governance of emerging novel governance issue-areas, such as deep seabed mining, artificial intelligence and lethal autonomous weapons. Our aim is to distill lessons for the design of a prohibitory global governance regime on experimental use and future deployment of solar geoengineering, including outlining a set of generic elements that a prohibitory solar geoengineering governance regime could include.

In response to the climate crisis, some scientists and other lobbyists have been advocating for more investment in solar geoengineering, a dangerous set of hypothetical technologies to block some incoming sunlight by spraying aerosols into the stratosphere. Given the global governance implications, the ecological threats, and the massively unequal humanitarian risks for vulnerable people, global resistance to solar geoengineering is strong, and there is growing recognition that this is a risky non-transformative approach that empowers those advocating for climate obstruction and delay on actions toward climate justice. Nevertheless, universities around the world are being offered, and are accepting, research funds to advance solar geoengineering technologies. This analysis focuses on the role of higher education institutions in advancing solar geoengineering acknowledging that it is a small group of scientists, mostly from elite universities in the Global North, that have been pushing the solar geoengineering agenda. In response to pressure to include the Global South, a strategic effort to funnel solar geoengineering research funds to universities in the Global South has broadened the geographic distribution of which institutions of higher education are receiving research funds. University funding for solar geoengineering research has so far been largely from philanthropy from technology and finance billionaires, but due to the effectiveness of solar geoengineering lobbyists public funding for solar geoengineering research may soon increase. The elite scientists who have been lobbying for more solar geoengineering research have used their power as “researchers” to devalue indigenous, feminist and other types of knowledge that emphasizes the dangers of investing in this approach. This paper demonstrates why efforts to promote solar geoengineering cannot be disentangled from a way of thinking that is based on the patriarchal and colonial assumptions of higher education that defines what kind of knowledge and whose values are most relevant.