Climate engineering

TechEthos defines climate engineering as a technology family which enables the modification of natural processes and human activities looking to detect, mitigate and respond to global threats due to climate change crisis, locally and globally.

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.

The term ‘Climate Engineering’ and the related term ‘geoengineering’ are, nevertheless, contentious. Some experts and expertise bodies prefer to avoid them all together or simply refer CDR and SRM as two separate categories, given the normative and practical differences between these two techniques. More information on this position is available in the report referenced below.

This label emerged at the outset of our project as it was framed along the lines of three broad technology families.

REFERENCE

Adomaitis, L., Grinbaum, A., Lenzi, D. (2022). TechEthos D2.2: Identification and specification of potential ethical issues and impacts and analysis of ethical issues of digital extended reality, neurotechnologies, and climate engineering. TechEthos Project Deliverable. Available here.

Glossary of terms

Terms featuring an asterisk are considered to be too frequent and as such are not popping up across the texts of our posts and pages. You can still access their definitions from the main glossary page.