Responding to Climate Change: U.S. Should Cautiously Pursue Solar Geoengineering

“The U.S. solar geoengineering research program should be all about helping society make more informed decisions,” said Chris Field, Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “As we continue to make slow progress in addressing climate change, we urgently need to understand the full range of options for alleviating its harms. Based on all of the evidence from social science, natural science, and technology — this research program could either indicate that solar geoengineering should not be considered further, or conclude that it warrants additional effort.”

Research Priorities
The report says the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) should lead the effort to establish and coordinate a solar geoengineering research program across federal agencies and scientific disciplines, with funding in the range of $100 million-$200 million over the first five years. USGCRP would enable oversight and governance of research activities, including ensuring peer review, coordinating budget proposals and requests, periodically assessing progress, and defining program goals. Funding should be set aside specifically for implementation of governance and public engagement efforts.

The research agenda should encompass 13 specific areas of research, which can be grouped into the following three broad areas of investigation:

·  Context and goals for solar geoengineering research, including research on the goals and social context for solar geoengineering research, developing modeling scenarios, strategies for decision-making under uncertainty, and the capacity needed for all countries to engage meaningfully on this issue.

·  Impacts and technical dimensions, including the properties of injected reflective particles and their interactions with clouds and atmospheric processes, possible climate outcomes and subsequent impacts on ecological and societal systems, technical requirements for advancing these technologies, and advancing monitoring and attribution capabilities.

·  Social dimensions, including research on public perceptions of and engagement with solar geoengineering; domestic and international conflict and cooperation; effective governance of solar geoengineering; and integration of justice, ethics, and equity considerations.

“For solar geoengineering, there are many unanswered scientific questions that address risks and unintended consequences, but equally important are the governance questions of who will decide and how long to deploy this intervention to mask global warming,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and committee chair of the 2015 National Academies report Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth. “Given the urgency of the climate crisis, solar geoengineering needs to be studied further. But just as with advances in fields such as artificial intelligence or gene editing, science needs to engage the public to ask not just can we, but should we?”

Research Governance
Careful governance will be critical for enabling solar geoengineering research to proceed. The report recommends governance mechanisms for solar geoengineering research that include roles for government, universities, independent institutions, research teams, and other nations.

The report also recommends that the U.S. support the development of international governance mechanisms, but notes robust international governance practices and institutions will likely emerge only after more countries commit to engage with this research. The report calls for promoting international partnerships — which should include participation from populations that have been historically underrepresented in global decision-making — within research teams, an international registry of solar geoengineering research, and thorough information sharing and cooperation. An ad-hoc working group under the auspices of the United Nations General Assembly or another international body should be created to address future governance needs for solar geoengineering research.   

The report says domestic and international governance of solar geoengineering can develop simultaneously, informing and strengthening each other, and that international cooperation among researchers can still develop in the absence of formal governance.