Climate Engineering represents a group of technologies that act on the Earth’s climate system to achieve a level of control over climate, thus holding the promise of mitigating climate change on a local and worldwide scale and detecting and responding to global threats due to the climate crisis. Also referred to as geoengineering, ‘Climate Engineering’ is a contentious term – you can read more about this in our glossary entry.
We distinguish between two main forms of Climate Engineering: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), which removes atmospheric CO2 and store it in geological, terrestrial, or oceanic reservoirs, and Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which aims to reflect some sunlight and heat back into space. You can explore specific techniques that fall in these categories below.
Despite their high research and industrial relevance, ethical concerns arise around these technologies: who can access them? Will these technologies have an effect locally or globally, and who is going to decide about them? What could be the future environmental consequences of their applications?
Ethical analysis
‘Ethics by design’ is at the core of TechEthos. It was necessary to identify the broad array of human and environmental values and principles at stake in Climate Engineering, to be able to include them from the very beginning of the process of research and development. Based on our ethical analysis, we will propose how to enhance or adjust existing ethical codesEthical codes indicate responsibilities o which individuals or organisations hold themselves to account [...] More, guidelines or frameworks.
Moral hazard: does climate engineering undermine climate mitigration?
This core dilemma asks if meaningful climate change mitigration is still possible if artificial changes are promised as solutions to the climate crises. This can take two distinct forms. Firstly, when mitigation is modelled over longer periods of time, the use of cheaper climate engineering later in the century might be preferred over more expensive mitigation costs at present or in the near future. Secondly, this choice of waiting until later to mitigate climate change can be particularly attractive at a political level, slowing down policy makers’ near-term efforts. Moreover, with some techniques that promise to mask the effects of climate change, mitigation risks to be abandoned altogether, despite not being sure empirically if CDR or SRM are possible at a large scale.
Moral corruption: Does climate engineering reflect a self-serving interest in avoiding politically difficult transitions away from fossil fuels?
This dilemma is closely related to that of moral hazard: the availability of climate engineering may be used as an argument by current generations to believe that they do not need to mitigate more rapidly now, thus passing the burden onto the next generation.
Hubris: Can climate engineering be justified by limited human foresightForesight is a systematic, participatory, future-intelligence-gathering and medium-to-long-term vision-building process [...]?
This dilemma emerges in context of the relationship between humanity and nature. Climate engineering seems to reflect an attitude of control or dominance over nature, to make it serve human beings. Researchers and ethicists consider that our current knowledge does not support some of the assumptions made about the possibility of achiving control over e.g., the global carbon cycle, while underestimating the harmful effects this could have.
In line with our key aim to enhance and adjust ethical guidance (in the form of codes, guidelines and frameworks) in the area of Climate Engineering, our team scanned the literature to identify already existing guidance that specifically addresses Climate Engineering or which is considered relevant in this area.
Existing ethical codes, if any, are largely considered insufficient and relatively unknown among private entities engaging in Climate Engineering research. The literature argues for the responsibility of researchers themselves but also that of funders regarding compliance with ethical codes. The inter-governmental Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries is mentioned as a potential example upon which to develop a Climate Engineering code that is flexible enough to account for changing needs.
Researchers have called on the international community to engage in a dialogue regarding the social benefits and risks of Climate Engineering research given the lack of a generally-accepted ethical frameworkEthical frameworks outline general or specific principles [...] More. From their perspective, frameworks should be clearly defined and delimited and acknowledge the systemic impact of such technology families. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Earth System Governance (ESG) Research Framework, and the Precautionary Decision-Making Framework (PDMF) are mentioned as potentially relevant in this endeavour.
Ethical guidelinesEthical guidelines collect general or specific principles [...] More for Climate Engineering per se are lacking, according to the literature, especially given the scale of intervention of such technologies. Some researchers are calling on the use of guidelines from the broader literature on ethics for research on human and animal subjects while such guidelines are being developed for Climate Engineering.
