Search

Sunlight reflection and carbon removal proposals for "climate engineering" (CE) confront governance challenges that many emerging technologies face: their futures are uncertain, and by the time one can discern their shape or impacts, vested interests may block regulation, and publics are often left out of decision‐making about them. In response to these challenges, "responsible research and innovation" (RRI) has emerged as a framework to critique and correct for technocratic governance of emerging technologies, and CE has emerged as a prime case of where it can be helpfully applied. However, a critical lens is rarely applied to RRI itself. In this review, we first survey how RRI thinking has already been applied to both carbon removal and sunlight reflection methods for climate intervention. We examine how RRI is employed in four types of activities: Assessment processes and reports, principles and protocols for research governance, critical mappings of research, and deliberative and futuring engagements. Drawing upon this review, we identify tensions in RRI practice, including whether RRI forms or informs choices, the positionalities of RRI practitioners, and ways in which RRI activities enable or disable particular climate interventions. Finally, we recommend that RRI should situate CE within the long arc of sociotechnical proposals for addressing climate change, more actively connect interrogations of the knowledge economy with reparative engagements, include local or actor‐specific contexts, design authoritative assessments grounded in RRI, and go beyond treating critique and engagement as "de facto" governance. This article is categorized under:Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate ChangeSocial Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since solar radiation management (SRM) technologies do not yet exist and capacities to model their impacts are limited, proposals for its governance are implicitly designed not around realities, but possibilities – baskets of risk and benefit that are often components of future imaginaries. This paper reports on the project Solar Radiation Management: Foresight for Governance (SRM4G), which aimed to encourage an anticipatory mode of thinking about the future of an engineered climate. Leveraging the participation of 15 scholars and practitioners heavily engaged in early conversations on SRM governance, SRM4G applied scenario construction to generate a set of alternative futures leading to 2030, each exercising different influences on the need for – and challenges associated with – development of SRM technologies. The scenarios then provided the context for the design of systems of governance with the capacity and legitimacy to respond to those challenges, and for the evaluation of the advantages and drawbacks of different options against a wide range of imaginary but plausible futures. SRM4G sought to initiate a conversation within the SRM research community on the capacity of foresight approaches to highlight the centrality of conceptions of the future to discussions of SRM's threats and opportunities, and in doing so, examined and challenged the assumptions embedded in conceptualizing SRM's aims, development and governance, and discussed the capacity of governance options to adapt to a wide range of possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece examines the need to interrogate the role of the conceptions of the future, as embedded in academic papers, policy documents, climate models, and other artifacts that serve as currencies of the science-society interface, in shaping scientific and policy agendas in climate engineering. Growing bodies of work on framings, metaphors, and models in the past decade serve as valuable starting points, but can benefit from integration with science and technology studies work on the sociology of expectations, imaginaries, and visions. Potentially valuable branches of work to come might be the anticipatory use of the future: the design of experimental spaces for exploring the future of an engineered climate in service of responsible research and innovation, and the integration of this work within the unfolding context of the Paris Agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the claim that in governance for solar climate engineering research, and especially field tests, there is no need for external governance beyond existing mechanisms such as peer review and environmental impact assessments that aim to assess technically defined risks to the physical environment. By drawing on the historical debate on recombinant DNA research, we show that defining risks is not a technical question but a complex process of narrative formation. Governance emerges from within, and as a response to, narratives of what is at stake in a debate. In applying this finding to the case of climate engineering, we find that the emerging narrative differs starkly from the narrative that gave meaning to rDNA technology during its formative period, with important implications for governance. While the narrative of rDNA technology was closed down to narrowly focus on technical risks, that of climate engineering continues to open up and includes social, political and ethical issues. This suggests that, in order to be legitimate, governance must take into account this broad perception of what constitutes the relevant issues and risks of climate engineering, requiring governance that goes beyond existing mechanisms that focus on technical risks. Even small-scale field tests with negligible impacts on the physical environment warrant additional governance as they raise broader concerns that go beyond the immediate impacts of individual experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we utilize a large and diverse expert interview exercise (N = 125) to critically examine the whole systems justice issues associated with ten negative emissions and ten solar geoengineering technologies. We ask: What equity and justice concerns arise with these 20 options? What particular vulnerable groups could be affected? What risks do these options entail for communities or the climate? Utilizing a "claims making" approach, we examine existing and prospective injustices across a pluralistic whole systems framework analyzing (i) resource extraction issues including minerals, chemicals, and fertilizers (ii) manufacturing, labor and ownership concerns, (iii) transportation-network and land-grabbing dynamics, (iv) unfair and exclusionary policymaking and planning, (v) operational injustices resulting from deployment and use, and (vi) waste flows, liabilities and disposal requirements. We then explore how these potential concerns culminate in a milieu of injustice cutting across the dimensions of distribution (who gets what), recognition (who counts), participation (who gets heard), capabilities (what matters), and responsibility (who does what). We conclude with insights for both policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]