Abstract
Besides mitigation and adaptation, geoengineering has been emerging as a new approach to deal with the challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change. However, the various definitions and designations for the concept and its clusters, as well as their unclear boundaries with the concepts of mitigation and adaptation, distort and invalidate the existence of a valuable debate in both academic and public contexts. Identifying the current overlaps, and making a comparative analysis with two previous proposals for the categorization of responses to anthropogenic climate change, this article presents a new categorization proposal directed to promote the essential rapprochement between the scientific community and policymakers. This proposal removes the term geoengineering, pointing out the advantages of a debate specifically oriented toward each method in particular. It is also explained how each category should be envisaged, rethinking the importance of international cooperation and stressing the decisive impact that public awareness could play in dealing with this challenge.
Highlights
In the face of one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century—climate change—geoengineering has been attracting increased international attention as it is seen as a potential complementary strategy to traditional responses given by mitigation and adaptation (Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, 2015; Stilgoe, 2015; Rickels et al, 2011)
This ambiguity, plus the negative connotation that the concept of geoengineering carries, makes the debate on the responses to be taken to address the problem of the anthropogenic climate change neither clear nor fruitful at the academic, public, and political levels
This article presented a new proposal for the categorization of responses to anthropogenic climate change with an easy understanding and visualization terminology: conventional mitigation, interventional mitigation, radiation management (RM), adaptation, and rectification
Summary
In the face of one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century—climate change—geoengineering has been attracting increased international attention as it is seen as a potential complementary strategy to traditional responses given by mitigation and adaptation (Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment, 2015; Stilgoe, 2015; Rickels et al, 2011). The overlap of the concepts of mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering, as well as the different definitions of geoengineering (Bellamy, Chilvers, Vaughan, & Lenton, 2012), hinder and distort the debate on this issue (IPCC, 2012) This is problematic given that climate change is a “wicked problem” (Prins et al, 2010), which demands a profound understanding of its multidimensionality and complexity, that is, a holistic approach able to link human society with its biological basis. This means that science and politics must join synergies to better understand the problem and find truly effective responses. The difficulties surrounding the debate on geoengineering hamper this path of cooperation between the scientific world and the political world, and climate governance
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