Abstract
Geoengineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change, has been more widely considered as an accompanying strategy to conventional climate change mitigation measures to combat global warming. However, this approach is far from achieving agreements from different institutional domains. Geoengineering, intended to be deployed on a planetary scale, would cause fundamental interventions to the human-environment system and create new risks and problems with high uncertainty and uneven distribution around the globe. Apart from the physical effects, conflicting attitudes appear from social, economic, and environmental worldviews in the international community. The intertwined sociotechnical complexity and conflicting attitudes make geoengineering a wicked and complex issue. This article elaborates the wickedness and complexity from a system perspective, primarily for an interdisciplinary, policy-oriented audience.
Highlights
Climate change and sustainable development are in a dual relationship
Comparing the distance of a possible catastrophe in Solar Radiation Management (SRM) (t0 + t1 + t’) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) (t0 + t2 + T’), we argue that T’ is generally longer than t’ considering that the buffer effects in the feedback system
While the previous session demonstrates CDR is generally superior over SRM from both the “essence of remedy” perspective and the “feedback loop system” perspective, this section might lead us toward an opposite conclusion when it comes to affordability
Summary
Climate change and sustainable development are in a dual relationship. On one hand, climate change influences human living conditions, ecosystems, and its services, thereby the life-supporting system for social and economic development. CDR approaches include (1) land use management to protect or enhance land carbon sinks; (2) the use of biomass for carbon sequestration as well as a carbon neutral energy source; (3) enhancement of natural weathering processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere; (4) direct engineered capture of CO2 from ambient air; and (5) the enhancement of oceanic uptake of CO2, for example, by fertilization of the oceans with naturally scarce nutrients or by increasing upwelling processes [18] Among all these methods, both Royal Society and Novim Group distinguished two SRM techniques as the most promising for research: shooting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere in order to deflect the sun’s light and heat and increasing albedo of marine clouds [19]. Geoengineering as a planetary-scale climate manipulation will cause an intervention in the earth’s cycles and produce side effects from various domains For such a complex adaptive system, the concurrent changes in different cycles could lead to an emerging property of substantive system change
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