Development of geopolitically relevant ranking criteria for geoengineering methods

Abstract

A decade has passed since Paul Crutzen published his editorial essay on the potential for stratospheric geoengineering to cool the climate in the Anthropocene. He synthesized the effects of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption on the planet's radiative budget and used this large-scale event to broaden and deepen the debate on the challenges and opportunities of large-scale geoengineering. Pinatubo had pronounced effects, both in the short and longer term (months to years), on the ocean, land, and the atmosphere. This rich set of data on how a large-scale natural event influences many regional and global facets of the Earth System provides a comprehensive viewpoint to assess the wider ramifications of geoengineering. Here, I use the Pinatubo archives to develop a range of geopolitically relevant ranking criteria for a suite of different geoengineering approaches. The criteria focus on the spatial scales needed for geoengineering and whether large-scale dispersal is a necessary requirement for a technique to deliver significant cooling or carbon dioxide reductions. These categories in turn inform whether geoengineering approaches are amenable to participation (the "democracy of geoengineering") and whether they will lead to transboundary issues that could precipitate geopolitical conflicts. The criteria provide the requisite detail to demarcate different geoengineering approaches in the context of geopolitics. Hence, they offer another tool that can be used in the development of a more holistic approach to the debate on geoengineering.

Climate engineering by mimicking natural dust climate control: the iron salt aerosol method

“…Recently, Boyd and Bressac (2016) suggested rapidly starting tests to determine the efficiency and side effects of CDR ocean iron fertilizing methods and analyzed possible geopolitical conflicts together with some other geoengineering methods (Boyd, 2016).…”

The geopolitics of negative emissions technologies: learning lessons from REDD+ and renewable energy for afforestation, BECCS, and direct air capture

“…Contrary to existing analyses, we are not interested in the energy security of individual states but rather apply the concept of geopolitics to NETs and their potential implications, inter alia for the security of states and other actors. The potential (geo-)political implications of these territorial requirements have been subject only of a very limited number of studies (see Boyd, 2016).…”

“…We claim that the discursive construction of space and identity which would take place in the wake of large-scale use might lead to new conflict configurations in its own right. We build on analyses of Boyd, who has developed a first set of geopolitical ranking criteria to evaluate various NETs as well as solar radiation management (SRM) measures (Boyd, 2016), and perspectives by Yusoff, who assesses the impact of discursive construction of 'an engineerable earth' on decision-making processes concerning geoengineering (Yusoff, 2013(Yusoff, , p. 2799. Furthermore, we take up the call for critically engaging with the 'long history of carbon removal' (Carton et al, 2020).…”

How do we overcome abrupt degradation of marine ecosystems and meet the challenge of heat waves and climate extremes?

“…The first and most concerning outcome of this intercomparison of different approaches is that despite several decades of advanced warning of the projected effects of global ocean change (see IPCC, 2018), proposed approaches for environmental intervention have not been designed for the present day, even though anthropogenic climate change is already evident in marine ecosystems (see IPCC, 2018 (Boyd, 2016;Corlett, 2017;Lohmann & Gasparini, 2017;Rau et al, 2012;van Oppen et al, 2015). Hence, many planned interventionist approaches are not technically advanced nor have they been widely field tested in preparation for severe episodic ecosystem declines and species range shifts that have now become widely reported (Hughes et al, 2017;Pecl et al, 2017;Wernberg et al, 2016).…”