As part of a research project exploring stratospheric particle injection to possibly mitigate global warming, a team of UK scientists and engineers in 2011 readied an experiment to spray water through a hose tethered to a balloon 1 km above Earth’s surface. Although the experiment’s environmental impacts would have been nil, leaders of the research ultimately called it off.
In 2012 the indigenous Haida people of British Columbia contracted to dump 100 metric tons of iron sulfate into waters off the west coast of Canada in hopes of stimulating phytoplankton growth and restoring a salmon fishery. Such ocean fertilization also has been proposed for removing and sequestering atmospheric carbon. But the practice is banned by the London Protocol on ocean dumping.
As discussion of geoengineering—the deliberate intervention in Earth’s climatic system to mitigate global warming—moves from the fringes of science to serious consideration as a possibly last-resort solution, such ethical quandaries are expected to proliferate for experimentalists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Fifth Assessment summary for policymakers released on 27 September, mentions geoengineering for the first time. It warns that solar radiation management—the injection of reflective particles into the atmosphere and arguably the most controversial geoengineering approach (see Physics Today, February 2013, page 17)—could alter the global water cycle and would do nothing to slow ocean acidification.
Although debate has arisen over who decides whether geoengineering technologies will ever be deployed, the more urgent issue for researchers is the sanctioning of outdoor experiments that must occur long before deployment. Because of the inherent risks of adverse impacts, agreement is widespread, even among geoengineering’s strongest proponents, that some sort of governance for such tests is needed.
A slippery slope
No national or international governance for geoengineering experiments currently exists, and not surprisingly for such a controversial subject, no consensus has emerged on the form it should take. Some organizations, such as the ETC Group, an environmental organization based in Ottawa, Canada, argue for a ban on all outdoor experimentation. But geoengineering researcher David Keith of Harvard University and others advocate a voluntary code of conduct that would only have to be adopted by a handful of funding agencies in the US, Europe, and Asia.
“There are legitimate fears of a slippery slope, and there is a fundamental lack of regulation,” Keith said at a September meeting of a National Research Council (NRC) committee that is assessing geoengineering research. “If someone really wanted to put large amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere over the US, it’s not obvious what regulations would bind,” he warned. The Clean Air Act doesn’t apply because, for one thing, it regulates only fixed emissions sources, and the Kyoto Protocol doesn’t apply because sulfur is not on its list of greenhouse gases. Federally funded experiments in the US could require an environmental assessment first, but no such restriction would apply to privately financed experiments. The lack of restrictions will create perceived—and possibly real—problems if large experiments do proceed.
In its 2009 report Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty, the UK’s Royal Society called for international scientific organizations to join in developing a code of practice for research and a voluntary research governance framework. The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology cooperated on geoengineering investigations that produced reports in 2009 and 2010. Both endorsed the Oxford principles, a set of five conditions drafted by a team of scholars, under which geoengineering research should be allowed to proceed. Those principles state that research should be regulated in the public interest, public engagement should be sought in the decision making, the research results should be publicly disclosed, the results should be independently assessed, and robust governance structures should be in place before any geoengineering technology is deployed.
Steve Rayner, a political anthropologist at Oxford University and an author of the principles, says the degree and formality of governance should vary with the severity of the potential side effects. “If you were talking about sulfur aerosols in the atmosphere, it would seem that unless you were up for a great deal of international conflict, it’s not something you would do without an international agreement,” he says. On the other hand, the planting of trees to serve as a carbon sink could be reasonably governed with existing planning and environmental protection laws.
Many approaches
Keith has proposed that NSF and a few other funding agencies, such as the European Research Council and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, develop a nonbinding memorandum of understanding (MOU) spelling out how they propose to evaluate experiments. Terms might include independent risk assessment, transparency, and degree of usefulness. Only a handful of agencies would need to sign the agreement, Keith said. “An MOU like that would tend to bind the research of even agencies that didn’t sign it,” he explained to the NRC committee, since other, nonsignatory funders would look to the MOU for guidance in reviewing research proposals they may receive.
Other parties argue for a more formal system of governance. Although his organization hasn’t backed a particular approach yet, Mark Lawrence, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, says that an international governance framework should be put in place before any field experimentation is done. “Our deep concern is with the potential for backlash and how that may hinder future basic science,” he says.
Scott Barrett, a Columbia University economist, advocates for an international agreement under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). But the regime can’t be so heavy-handed that it loses participation from countries that are in a position to do geoengineering, he told the NRC panel. He added a note of realism: “The idea that people are going to spend a lot of effort and go right to high-level laws on things that aren’t happening and may not ever happen is kind of naive.”
Barrett disagreed with hardliners who argue that no geoengineering research should be done. “Do you really want to do nothing until we’re in a very, very tight situation, and is it really plausible to think that you’re going to get 193 countries to do nothing about this through an international agreement?” he asked.
To an extent, the ethical situation facing geoengineering is analogous to the advent of recombinant DNA technology in the mid 1970s. In that case, scientists agreed to an international moratorium on gene-splicing research until a code of conduct on biosafety, now known as the Asilomar principles, was developed. In the US, the National Institutes of Health created a committee of external advisers to review the safety and ethical issues involved with grant proposals involving rDNA. David Winickoff, an ethicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the NRC panel that a geoengineering advisory committee could review experimental proposals, ensure public disclosure and access to results, perform annual reviews of the science, and reach out to other nations’ governance bodies.
Lawrence thinks a likely scenario is for the scientific community to develop a code of conduct that will be administered by an international organization—perhaps the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the international Convention on Biological Diversity—or, alternatively, that will be adopted by the funding agencies of the research-funding nations.
Matt Watson, who heads the research project SPICE (stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering), which had planned to spray water from the tethered balloon, disputes news reports that blamed public opposition for cancellation of the experiment. A small element of the overall research project, the experiment was delayed to the point where it became less useful, he says. “From the standpoint of someone who was about to conduct an experiment that had absolutely no climate signature whatsoever, I would argue that a level of preexisting governance would have helped that experiment,” he says. “We were going to make sure it was safe and very well communicated and legal. But we thought it might be used by other people to legitimize outdoor research that everybody would be uncomfortable with.”
A UK experiment dubbed SPICE (stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering) would have tested a method for injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere through a 1-km-long pipe attached to a tethered balloon. It was canceled due to concerns over the lack of governance for geoengineering experiments.
A UK experiment dubbed SPICE (stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering) would have tested a method for injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere through a 1-km-long pipe attached to a tethered balloon. It was canceled due to concerns over the lack of governance for geoengineering experiments.
Watson favors strong international governance and says that it must include representation from outside the US and Europe. The governing body he foresees would register experiments, ensure the transparency and communication of the results, and review proposals for scale and possible adverse effects.
Negligible impacts?
A key point of division in the governance debate is over whether outdoor experiments below a certain size should be allowed to proceed without approval. Keith, a proponent of such a threshold, has proposed an experiment that would deliver 1 kg of sulfur and 100 kg of water by balloon into the stratosphere and observe the effects. He says the experiment could help inform models that predict whether stratospheric sulfate injection could keep Earth’s temperature within safe levels. Keith suggests that his experiment is sufficiently small, as measured by its estimated annual impact on radiative forcing, to be allowed to proceed without a specific ethical review.
But others interviewed say there should be no threshold level for experiments. Watson, for instance, agrees that Keith’s experiment would be inconsequential climatologically and its effects so small that he would have trouble even detecting them. But, he says, “the social impacts and the reverberations around undertaking that experiment are significant. I don’t know if they can or should be predicted or managed.” Intentions are very important, he says; if the experiment was labeled as something other than geoengineering, no one would care. He points to a 2011 experiment on cloud microphysics that was performed off the coast of Monterey, California. Although much larger in scale than SPICE and having what Watson says was “a profound effect on the local climate,” the experiment created no public stir because few people realized at the time that it was related to geoengineering. “People release atmospheric tracers for experiments all the time, but because it’s about atmospheric chemistry and looking at weather systems, nobody would ever object to them.”
Lawrence argues that potential backlash from even very small-scale experiments involving solar radiation management could threaten research in noncontroversial areas of atmospheric research as well. He notes how the 2012 ocean fertilization incident off Canada may influence the changes being made to the London Protocol that will make it difficult for non-climate-related research on surface water nutrient cycling to proceed. The 87 countries that are parties to the protocol agreed in 2010 to ban ocean fertilization for other than scientific research purposes; they also established a framework for assessing such experiments that does not include a threshold.
