School of Social and Political Science

Description

What happens when geoengineering meets geopolitical competition?

There is a growing scientific and political interest in exploring the development and use of solar geoengineering technologies to manipulate incoming solar radiation to cool global temperatures.

An emerging ‘risk-risk’ framing that compares the risks of a world with solar geoengineering to one with unmitigated climate change has begun to shape considerations of these technological interventions. This is evident in recent UK government funding calls for solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification (SRM) techniques that explicitly ask for this risk-risk assessment. Concerns have been raised that this framing may present a false choice between geoengineering and unmitigated climate change that makes SRM appear less risky or more desirable from an environmental perspective.

This is an important problem, but an underexplored challenge of this framing is that it limits assessments of these potential interventions to their environmental impacts without adequate consideration of their potential geopolitical implications. This talk thus explores solar geoengineering as a potential source of geopolitical competition and conflict over control of the atmosphere.