Abstract
The debate about the possibilities to engineer the Earth's climate has changed drastically in the last years. Suggestions of large-scale technological interventions to combat climate change that a decade ago would have been discarded as science fiction are slowly moving into the center of international climate change discussions, research, and politics. In this article, I elaborate three joint key challenges to geo-engineering research from a resilience perspective, with a special emphasis on governance issues. First, I discuss the need to understand geo-engineering proposals from a planetary boundaries perspective. Second, I elaborate why the notion of Earth stewardship and geo-engineering are not necessarily in conflict, but instead could be viewed as complementary approaches. Last, I discuss the critical need to explore an institutional setting that is strong enough to weed out geo-engineering proposals that carry considerable ecological risk, but still allow for novelty, fail-safe experimentation, and continuous learning. These issues are critical for our understanding of how to effectively govern global environmental risks, complex systems, and emerging technologies in the Anthropocene.
Highlights
Human attempts to modify the climate are not new at all
Suggestions of large-scale technological interventions to combat climate change that a decade ago would have been discarded as science fiction are slowly moving into the center of international climate change discussions, research, and politics
The second is the recent initiative by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to include an assessment of geo-engineering technologies in its future fifth Assessment Reports (AR5, see www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ ar5/ar5-outline-compilation.pdf)
Summary
Human attempts to modify the climate are not new at all. On the contrary, history provides us with a number of examples of weather modification schemes, as well as larger scale suggestions on how to rework global scale climate dynamics (Fleming 2010). It should be noted that this definition includes a suite of geoengineering proposals that differ considerably both in terms of the scale of experimentation, to deployment It includes both (1) solar radiation management techniques such as the deployment of stratospheric aerosols or whitening clouds in the lower atmosphere; as well as (2) carbon dioxide removal proposals such as ocean iron fertilization, carbon capture and storage, afforestation and reforestation, and the enhancing of soil carbon (for a more elaborate presentation, see Royal Society 2009, GAO 2011). It should be noted that current discussions of geoengineering include technologies that intend to counteract warming through the regulation of solar radiation, e.g., injection of stratospheric aerosols, cloud brightening, increases in surface albedo, and a suite of proposals that build on ecosystem-based approaches such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), long-term storage of charcoal in soils (biochar), and reforestation and afforestation. There is still a need to elaborate additional issues with clear connection to resilience science and the study of social-ecological systems
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