UNESCO report warns of ethical risks of Climate Engineering

• UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST) has published its first ever report on the Ethics of Climate Engineering.
• It proposes a comprehensive global ethical perspective on climate engineering technologies and lists specific recommendations for their possible use.

ABOUT CLIMATE ENGINEERING

• Climate Engineering, also known as “geoengineering,” is the intentional large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system to counter climate change.
• Climate engineering is classified into two groups of techniques-
  • Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which removes and stores the emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. CDR is expensive, involves five approaches. These include
    • direct air capture,
    • land-use management through afforestation / reforestation,
    • sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by biomass that may also be used as an energy source,
    • increasing the uptake of CO2 by the ocean and
    • enhancing natural weathering processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
  • Solar radiation modification (SRM), which reflects sunlight back to space. This approach include
    • increasing the surface reflectivity of the planet by painting structures with reflective paints,
    • planting crops with high reflectivity, enhancing the reflectivity of marine clouds to reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the surface,
    • removing infrared-absorbing clouds from the atmosphere to reduce trapped heat,
    • Injecting aerosols into the lower stratosphere to mimic the cooling induced by volcanic eruptions and
    • lowering the solar radiation reaching the Earth by placing reflectors or shields in space .

ETHICAL CONCERNS

• Climate engineering could undermine existing climate policies and divert funding from vital emission reduction and adaptation efforts.
• The unknown and unintended consequences of these technologies need risks evaluation and management.
• The high cost of developing and deploying these tools could also exacerbating global inequalities between countries of different economic weight, especially in terms of the distribution of risks.
• Geoengineering tools could also have the potential for military or geo-political use.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• UNESCO recommended its Member States to introduce legislation that regulates climate action while also considering the transboundary impact of their decisions on all human beings and ecosystems.
• The report also urged countries belonging to a geographic area to make regional agreements to avoid risks of unequal spatial distribution of effects.
• It called for a ban on using climate engineering techniques as a weapon (weaponisation).
• Also, it added that political or economic interests should not interfere with scientific research on climate engineering.