IDCE 30334 - Climate and Social Justice

Climate change is generating sufficient risk for nation-states and citizens throughout the Arctic to warrant potentially radical geoengineering solutions. Currently, geoengineering solutions such as surface albedo modification or aerosol deployment are in the early stages of testing and development. Due to the scale of deployments necessary to enact change, and their preliminary nature, these methods are likely to result in unforeseen consequences. These consequences may range in severity from local ecosystem impacts to large scale changes in available solar energy.

Geoengineering as a technological intervention to avert the dangerous climate change has been on the table at least since 2006. The global outreach of the technology exercised in a non-encapsulated system, the concerns with unprecedented levels and scales of impact and the overarching interdisciplinarity of the project make the geoengineering debate ethically quite relevant and complex.