This publication is the first of its kind for IRGC: an ‘opinion piece’ written by experts in the field, on a topical, possibly controversial, issue with important risk governance implications. Unlike other IRGC publications (e.g. policy briefs and reports), IRGC opinion pieces allow the authors to express their personal views and policy recommendations on the issue in question.
This opinion piece was written for IRGC by Prof. Granger Morgan (Chairman of IRGC’s Scientific and Technical Council and Head, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University) and Katharine Ricke (Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University).
The world needs to achieve roughly an 80% reduction in emissions of CO2 in order to avoid a significantly changed and warmer climate. Achieving this reduction is predicted to be both slow (decades to centuries) and expensive (perhaps 0.5% to 5% of world GDP). In contrast, if the fraction of sunlight reflected by the earth back into space (the albedo) is slightly increased, then the planet is cooled. Activities that increase earth’s albedo are called “solar radiation management” or SRM. While SRM may be relatively cheap and fast, it is also imperfect. It is controversial because it does not target the root cause of climate change, i.e. greenhouse gas emissions.
Nevertheless, as Donald Johnston (IRGC Chairman, 2010) notes in the foreword to the IRGC paper, SRM “may indeed be inevitable as a last resort”. The authors argue that in order to be prepared in the event of a “climate emergency”, or for the case where someone tries to undertake SRM unilaterally, it is now time to establish an internationally coordinated, open research programme on SRM. They call on the research community to define a set of limits within which modest low-level field research could be conducted with minimal impact. In parallel with this research, they call for an effort to engage the foreign policy community in discourse to identify alternative possible approaches to the global governance of SRM and assess their strengths and limitations.
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