Rich man’s solution? Climate engineering discourses and the marginalization of the Global South

Abstract

Numerous recent studies project that ‘climate engineering’ technologies might need to play a major role in the future. Such technologies may carry major risks for developing countries that are often especially vulnerable to, and lack adaptive capacity to deal with, the impacts of such new technologies. In this situation, one would expect that developing countries—especially the least developed countries that are most vulnerable—should play a central role in the emerging discourse on climate engineering. And yet, as this article shows in detail, the discussion about whether and how to engage with these technologies is shaped by experts from just a small set of countries in the Global North. Knowledge production around climate engineering remains heavily dominated by the major research institutions in North America and Europe. Drawing on information from 70 climate engineering events between 2009 and 2017 along with extensive document analysis, the article maps a lack of involvement of developing countries and highlights the degree to which their concerns remain insufficiently represented in politically significant scientific assessment reports. The article concludes by sketching options that developing countries may have to influence the agenda on climate engineering, reflecting on earlier attempts to increase control over novel technologies and influence global agenda setting.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
Int Environ Agreements (2019) 19:151–167
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-019-09431-0
1 3
ORIGINAL PAPER
Rich man’s solution? Climate engineering discourses
andthemarginalization oftheGlobal South
FrankBiermann1 · InaMöller2
Accepted: 7 February 2019 / Published online: 6 March 2019
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract
Numerous recent studies project that ‘climate engineering’ technologies might need to play
a major role in the future. Such technologies may carry major risks for developing countries
that are often especially vulnerable to, and lack adaptive capacity to deal with, the impacts
of such new technologies. In this situation, one would expect that developing countries—
especially the least developed countries that are most vulnerable—should play a central
role in the emerging discourse on climate engineering. And yet, as this article shows in
detail, the discussion about whether and how to engage with these technologies is shaped
by experts from just a small set of countries in the Global North. Knowledge production
around climate engineering remains heavily dominated by the major research institutions
in North America and Europe. Drawing on information from 70 climate engineering events
between 2009 and 2017 along with extensive document analysis, the article maps a lack
of involvement of developing countries and highlights the degree to which their concerns
remain insufficiently represented in politically significant scientific assessment reports. The
article concludes by sketching options that developing countries may have to influence the
agenda on climate engineering, reflecting on earlier attempts to increase control over novel
technologies and influence global agenda setting.
Keywords Climate engineering· Least developed countries· Geoengineering· Climate
policy
* Frank Biermann
f.biermann@uu.nl
1 Copernicus Institute ofSustainable Development, Utrecht University, Princetonlaan 8a,
3584CBUtrecht, TheNetherlands
2 Department ofPolitical Science, Lund University, Box52, 22100Lund, Sweden
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1 Introduction
At the 2015 Paris conference on climate change, governments agreed to limit temperature
increase to well below 2°C, aiming for 1.5 °C. The question is now: how to get there?
Influential climate models seem to suggest that reaching these targets would require sub-
stantial interventions into the earth’s natural systems through so-called ‘climate engineer-
ing’ technologies.1 For example, most of the low-temperature pathways presented in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on 1.5 °C rely on a mas-
sive expansion of bioenergy use with subsequent carbon capture and storage, or large-scale
afforestation, to extract billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The
report’s reference to stratospheric aerosol injection (a technology that imitates volcanic
eruptions to cool global temperature) as an option to ‘temporarily reduce the severity of
near-term impacts’ in overshoot scenarios further indicates that in mainstream climate sci-
ence, some form of climate engineering is expected to become part of the response to cli-
mate change (Allen etal. 2018, p. 71).
In OECD countries, some of these technologies are already considered as potential cli-
mate policies. For example, the United Kingdom has allocated substantial funding to study
greenhouse gas removal technologies (Natural Environment Research Council 2018), and
Sweden aims to achieve negative emissions after 2045 including through investment in cli-
mate projects abroad (Government Offices Sweden 2017). Several United States govern-
ment agencies (including the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) commissioned
a special report on climate intervention that was published by the National Academy of
Sciences in 2015 (McNutt etal. 2015a, b). Also major transnational companies like Shell
are relying on carbon dioxide removal for scenarios in which they would conform with the
2°C target (Evans 2018).
Yet, recent studies also show that using bioenergy at the scale suggested would result
in major impacts on land use, water availability and loss of natural habitat (Boysen etal.
2017); and stratospheric aerosol injection could impact global precipitation patterns, pos-
sibly inducing drought in equatorial regions (Tilmes etal. 2013). Most severely affected by
possible negative impacts would be the world’s least developed countries. These 47 low-
income nations are identified by the United Nations as those with the most severe structural
impediments to sustainable development, especially high vulnerability to economic and
environmental shocks and particularly limited human assets.2 It is in these countries where
the impacts of environmental change already pose substantial threats to human develop-
ment (Biermann etal. 2016).
And yet, it was the least developed countries that were central in advocating for the
1.5°C target. Together with the (partially overlapping) group of small island states, they
provided much of the political momentum to adopt the more stringent temperature target of
1.5°C in the Paris climate negotiations (Brun 2016).
2 The current list of least developed countries (March 2018) is available at https ://www.un.org/devel opmen
t/desa/dpad/wp-conte nt/uploa ds/sites /45/publi catio n/ldc_list.pdf.
1 The scientific literature usually divides climate engineering techniques into those that modify reflectivity
(so-called solar radiation management) and those that absorb and remove carbon dioxide. Although widely
used, this demarcation based only on physical processes obscures some political issues associated with
jurisdiction and scale, so that we prefer to speak of individual technologies instead.
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Given that the least developed countries pushed for this ambitious climate policy goal,
how is it then that the global community’s most influential scientific reports on climate
change suggest solutions that might bring additional risks for them?
In this article, we argue that one part of the answer lies in the composition of the climate
science community and its low representation of authors from the Global South. Given
the principle of sovereign equality in international law that grants each country the same
vote, least developed countries enjoy, just through their numbers, substantial influence in
intergovernmental negotiations. Yet, their lack of involvement in climate mitigation sci-
ence means a lack of voice in formulating climate scenarios and policy options. Because
of this, climate engineering options like large-scale afforestation or the massive expansion
of bioenergy with subsequent carbon capture and storage are deemed reasonable, despite
their potentially negative impact on important concerns of least developed countries. These
include ending patterns of growth that thrive on the unsustainable use of public goods,
the extraction of natural assets and the exploitation of developing countries’ labour (Least
Developed Countries Independent Expert Group 2014).
In the following, we give first a brief background to our study and then present our
analysis on the representation of least developed countries in climate engineering science,
highlighting their lack of voice in the production of knowledge and the limited acknowl-
edgement of their concerns in assessment reports that inform governmental decision-mak-
ing. We subsequently suggest options that least developed countries could pursue to gain
influence on the types of pathways and scenarios that are prioritised in influential scientific
arenas.
2 Climate engineering, least developed countries andthelong‑term
global goal
An analysis of the influence of least developed countries in global debates on climate engi-
neering needs to be seen in light of the general evolution of climate science over the last
decades. For example, recent analyses of the IPCC show that the composition of authors
who contribute to writing IPCC reports is heavily dominated by experts based in Europe
and North America. This was blatantly the case for the first IPCC reports in the 1990s
(Biermann 2001, 2002), but has not changed much. Evaluating the four assessment reports
published between 1990 and 2007, Ho-Lem etal. (2011) found that people from Africa
or South America make up only 3.1% of IPCC authors in total, compared to 35.6% and
37.2% from Europe and North America. Also, 45% of all countries—all from the develop-
ing world—have never had authors contributing in IPCC processes. Corbera etal. (2016)
conducted a comparable analysis for the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, in which they find
a dominance of institutions from the United Kingdom and the United States that act as
training sites for authors in working group III (the section of the assessment report that
focuses on mitigation in particular). This leads them to conclude that the United States
and the United Kingdom are even more dominant than the number of participating authors
reported by either of these countries.
Despite the overrepresentation of the Global North in climate science, the policy solu-
tions that are being developed often affect especially developing countries. The highest
potential for bioenergy development and industrial forestry, for example, is consistently
projected to be in developing countries around the equator (Haberl etal. 2011; Zomer
etal. 2008). The same holds for carbon dioxide removal techniques that are not based on
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F.Biermann, I.Möller
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photosynthesis, for instance, mineral weathering that involves industrial scale, open-pit
mining of olivine and other silicates (Kohler etal. 2010). Least developed countries, on
their part, generally lack financial and institutional capacity, which make them vulnerable
to increasing land acquisition by foreign investors. They are also prone to suffer from food
insecurity caused by investment in bioenergy crops, regardless of where they are grown
(Yengoh and Armah 2015).
High risks for least developed countries also come with other climate engineering tech-
nologies, for instance, with stratospheric aerosol injection and its requirement to maintain
deployment until carbon dioxide concentrations have been reduced.3 Some models sug-
gest that stratospheric aerosol injections would influence precipitation patterns and reduce
rainfall in areas that rely on the monsoon and that reducing such variations in precipita-
tion would require ‘overcooling of the tropics’, hence even more deployment in equato-
rial regions (MacMartin et al. 2013). Although stratospheric aerosol injection is a com-
paratively cheap technology to deploy, its effective continuous deployment requires money,
technological capability as well as effective command of territory and some degree of
global power (Parson 2014). Given these requirements, smaller developing countries are
unlikely to be able to actively use stratospheric aerosol injection themselves. Using strato-
spheric aerosols to limit global temperature rise would hence create a century-long depend-
ence on those governments that do have the necessary means for such interventions. This
dependency on powerful actors and their decisions on where and how to deploy strato-
spheric aerosol injection would run counter to some of the post-2015 Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals that least developed countries have prioritised, in particular addressing the
highly imbalanced political economy and fostering democratic systems to manage public
goods from the local to the global level (Least Developed Countries Independent Expert
Group 2014).
Despite all these side effects, developing countries might decide that some form of
climate engineering is in their interest. In a recent comment in Nature, academics from
Bangladesh, Brazil and Ethiopia rejected the ‘paternalistic’ advice provided by some non-
governmental groups that advocate against climate engineering technologies because of its
implications for Africa. They argue that there is only so much that developing countries
can do to advance mitigation and that the primary actors on this front are in the Global
North. If temperatures keep rising, the benefits of stratospheric aerosol injection may out-
weigh its drawbacks (Rahman etal. 2018). In their study of non-western perspectives, Carr
and Yung (2018) come to a similar conclusion. Based on interviews with environmental
professionals from the South Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa and the North American Arctic,
they find that people who are highly vulnerable to climate change might be willing to con-
sider stratospheric aerosol injection, but that their acceptance is characterised as ‘deeply
reluctant and highly conditional’ and must be understood in the context of frustrations with
the current lack of mitigation.
In short, the stakes for least developed countries are high. If the Paris temperature tar-
gets are not reached due to lacking reform measures in the Global North and more wealthy
parts of the Global South, then least developed countries might face a difficult choice:
3 If stratospheric aerosol injection were deployed while greenhouse gases continued to accumulate in the
atmosphere, and then abruptly stopped, global temperatures would rise dramatically in a short period of
time. This would lead to what has been called a global ‘termination shock’ that would be catastrophic for
natural ecosystems and human institutions (Jones etal. 2013).
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between the risks of drastic climatic change and the risks of supporting climate engineer-
ing by powerful industrialised countries.
Yet, what is their role in current debates? How are they involved, to what extent are
their views and concerns represented and through what means could they influence the
climate engineering discourse? These questions are of great importance, particularly under
the consideration that science and the epistemic communities that produce it play a fun-
damental role in shaping the ‘realities’ that inform world politics (Antoniades 2003). The
way that climate engineering is defined and the questions that are being asked are already
shaped by some countries in the Global North, not least by their authoritative scientific
bodies (Belter and Seidel 2013; Gupta and Möller 2018).
In the remainder of this article, we analyse the degree and types of involvement of rep-
resentatives of developing countries, especially least developed countries, in discursive
networks around climate engineering. We look at both the discursive process and the dis-
cursive content. We study the process by analysing representation in the epistemic commu-
nity around climate engineering, understood as the community of experts actively involved
in producing knowledge on the subject and fostering interest for their community’s policy
project (Antoniades 2003). We study the content by evaluating the climate engineering dis-
course in areas where science is expected to have high impact on policy. These are best
captured in scientific assessment reports and in the reports of science policy workshops in
the Global South.
3 Representation inthediscursive process
To assess representation in the discursive process, we analysed lists of speakers at climate
engineering events and the organisations that they are affiliated with. These events were
identified with the help of climate engineering newsletters (including the ‘Geoengineer-
ing Google Group’ and the ‘Climate Engineering Newsletter’ distributed by the Kiel Earth
Institute), snowballing on from there to look for further activity of any mentioned research
projects.4 We identified 84 events related to climate engineering that took place between
2009 and 2017: 75% in OECD countries (of which three-thirds were in the United King-
dom, the United States and Germany); 13% in the group of the so-called BRICS countries
(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa); and 12% in developing countries. Out of
these 84 events, 70 provided information about the programme and were thus included
in our further analyses.5 (Those that did not provide information reflected the same geo-
graphic proportions as the events overall.) The resulting database contains 1263 speakers,
which can be aggregated into 779 individuals. 208 of these individuals spoke at more than
one event, indicating a relatively small active epistemic community.
For each speaker, we recorded their (self-reported) affiliation and coded these organi-
sations according to the country in which it is based. We then calculated the distribution
4 Because these newsletters are published in English or German, we may not have captured all climate
engineering events in this period. The focus of the newsletters on ‘climate engineering’ or ‘geoengineering’
means that events on the expansion of bioenergy use with carbon capture and storage or negative emissions
[terms that originated in the context of integrated assessment models and a different epistemic community
(Haikola etal. 2018)] are possibly underrepresented.
5 Our choice to begin with 2009 was motivated by the simultaneous appearance of the 1.5°C target on the
global agenda and the publication of the Royal Society report on Geoengineering governance. This trans-
ported the marginal topic of climate engineering into a wider debate on climate science (Owen 2014). 2017
provides the end year of our analysis.
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F.Biermann, I.Möller
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of countries based on institutions that appeared more than once in the database, signify-
ing substantial involvement. Our use of organisations to measure country representation
is partly motivated by theoretical and partly by practical reasons. The institutions in which
researchers work play an important part in their scientific socialisation and the research
they engage with (see also Corbera etal. (2016)). It is therefore worth looking at where
the research is being produced rather than focusing on the nationalities of researchers. Fur-
thermore, coding researcher nationality is a difficult endeavour that entails the collection
of personal information, while not necessarily providing insights important to the research
question overall.
Figure 1 provides descriptive statistics about the geographical origin of organisations
represented at climate engineering events. For each year, the graph distinguishes between
researchers based at organisations in OECD countries (1), BRICS countries (Brazil, Rus-
sia, India, China and South Africa) (2) and developing countries (3). Importantly for our
study, in all workshops, no active member from an organisation based in a least developed
country was represented; because the value for ‘least developed countries’ would have been
consistently zero, we excluded it from the graph that we present here.
In each group, the stacked colours signify different countries. The dominance of pink,
turquoise and olive in the OECD group shows that most organisations we coded are based
in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany (47, 42 and 22, respectively).
These are followed (with a sizeable gap) by the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. Over-
all, OECD countries are overwhelmingly represented. From the BRICS countries, China,
India and Brazil have each 3–4 active organisations in our database. The other developing
countries show much less involvement, with only 12 organisations distributed across Fiji,
Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Singapore and Thailand.
Out of the organisations based in a developing country, those that were represented as
speakers at more than one event were the African Academy of Sciences, the University of
Nairobi, Kenyatta University, the University of the South Pacific, the Indonesian Ministry
for Energy and Mineral Resources and the National Science Museum of Thailand. How-
ever, their representation is comparatively small. Whereas these organisations participate
with 2–3 people each, the best represented institutions in the OECD group (the Institute for
Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, Oxford University and Harvard University)
participate with teams of 10–17 people each. For comparison, the best represented organ-
isations in the BRICS group (the Council for Energy, Environment and Water in India,
Beijing Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Sao
Paulo) participate with 3–6 researchers each.
Importantly, the nine developing country events we identified were always initiated
and/or co-hosted by a European organisation. The Solar Radiation Management Govern-
ance Initiative, the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany and the Inter-
national Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria have been particularly active
in this regard. Their work towards heightening inclusion from developing countries has,
among others, resulted in the initiation of the ‘DECIMALS’ fund. Financed by the United
States-based Open Philanthropy Project, the fund supports developing country researchers
to study the potential impacts of solar radiation management in their region by using mod-
elling data from initiatives like the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (Solar
Radiation Management Governance Initiative 2018). Similar research support for other
types of enquiry is, as far as we are aware of, not yet available.
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Two caveats are to be added to our findings: first, our results represent only events that
were held, or referred to, in the English language and might hence under-represent devel-
opments in a non-OECD context, such as in China. Second, we coded the geographical
affiliation of speakers according to their home institution and not their nationality or coun-
try of origin, which is likely to overrepresent European and North American discursive
input.
Overall, we conclude that North American and European actors heavily dominate the
debate on climate engineering and that efforts to increase participation of developing
countries so far largely resulted in a one-way information transfer from North to South
rather than a dialogue that takes place on equal footing. Considering the technical nature
of climate engineering and the early stages of these debates, such results do not come as
a surprise. The idea to engineer the climate in response to global warming was brought
onto a scientific agenda by actors in the global North (notably in the United States) and
still constitutes a foreign concept to many people in the world. Meanwhile, scientific and
political capacities in least developed countries are already stretched, and resources that are
available for issues related to climate change are allocated to more pressing questions of
adaptation and emergency management. The current low level of involvement of develop-
ing countries, and particular least developed countries, in this debate seems hence less a
consequence of purposeful exclusion than of persistent structural inequalities in global sci-
ence—which makes the situation no less problematic.
Fig. 1 Distribution of countries in the climate engineering discursive process, based on institutions repre-
sented at more than one climate engineering event (in the capacity of speakers). Countries are coded based
on the International Naming Convention
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4 Representation inthediscursive content
How does this low representation affect the content of current climate engineering dis-
courses? How are the aspirations and voices of developing countries, in particular those of
the least developed countries, represented in climate engineering science? How are their
interests, special circumstances and vulnerabilities addressed? We studied this question
by conducting a detailed content analysis of reports that have emerged out of the epis-
temic community on climate engineering. First, we studied the representation of interests
of developing and least developed countries in two major climate engineering assessments
conducted by interdisciplinary research groups in Europe and the United States. Sec-
ond, we analysed the content of those few reports that have resulted from workshops that
focused on developing countries and/or that were held in a developing country, looking
for key interests and concerns on climate engineering from a developing country perspec-
tive. In all cases, we studied not only the content of the reports but also the overall context,
including data on participation in the production of the report, its mandate and any spon-
soring organisations. While our main research focus is representation of the 47 least devel-
oped countries, we employed for practical reasons a wider definition in our content analysis
and looked also at general references to ‘developing countries’ or ‘poorer countries’.
We identify the degree of marginalisation of the concerns of least developed countries
based on four indicators, which we derived from general position papers of least developed
countries in multilateral negotiations:
1. Vulnerability First, we scrutinised the texts with a view to explicit considerations for
the special concerns of least developed countries relating to their high poverty, limited
human assets and high economic vulnerability. To what extent are implicit or explicit
risk assessments in climate engineering discourses cognizant of the particularly high
vulnerability of the least developed countries?
2. Role acknowledgement Second, we analysed how the role of least developed countries
is described in the reporting (to the extent that they are explicitly mentioned). Are they
presented as active stakeholders in research and decision-making; are they rather seen
as passive onlookers; or are they not mentioned at all?
3. Decision-making and governance Third, recent discourses on climate engineering
engaged in initial debates on governance and decision-making regarding such tech-
nologies. In general, least developed countries in United Nations negotiations prefer
multilateral decision-making based on sovereign equality and effective involvement of
all countries, as opposed to, for instance, more restricted international fora such as the
Group of 8, or fora with weighted voted such as the World Bank. We hence scrutinised
the texts with regards to how suggested modes of decision-making and governance
of climate engineering (if any) refer to multilateral institutions where least developed
countries have some influence and voting power (such as the United Nations) or rather
refer to ‘minilateral’ modes of governance (for example by centring on the Group of 7
or the Group of 20) or to private modes of governance that build on the leadership of
major corporations or scientific organisations dominated by Northern countries.
4. Equity Fourth, we analysed the texts regarding possible discussions on questions of
global equity, justice and fairness, an issue consistently emphasised by representatives
of least developed countries in international negotiations. While there is no generally
accepted theory or understanding of global justice despite a lively debate in this field,
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we were curious to what extent the analysed documents would pay any attention to such
ethical questions in the first place, and what the respective conclusions were.
4.1 Mainstream documents onclimate engineering
To answer these questions, we first analysed central documents of the climate engineering
debate, focusing on two of the most extensive assessments on climate engineering: the 2015
European Transdisciplinary Assessment of Climate Engineering (EuTRACE) (Schäfer
etal. 2015) and the 2015 Climate Intervention assessment conducted by the United States
National Academy of Sciences (McNutt etal. 2015a, b). The EuTRACE report presents
results from a 2-year, EU-funded project that brought together experts from 14 European
institutions. In 170 pages, it informs the European Commission on how climate engineer-
ing could relate to its ambitious climate targets. The National Academy of Sciences report
is a two-volume document of 375 pages on climate intervention techniques, presenting the
results of a 2-year enquiry mandated by the US government. Our choice of these reports
is motivated by their comprehensive approach and their direct relevance to policy making.
Similar to the IPCC assessment reports, these documents are compiled by large groups of
researchers that aim to create a state-of-the-art overview for decision-makers.
Overall, the EuTRACE report evidences a lack of attention for what large-scale climate
engineering technologies might imply for the livelihoods of the world’s poorest. Only indi-
rectly does it refer to risks and resource demands in developing countries, for instance,
by pointing out issues like land use competition and enhanced effectiveness of some tech-
niques in places that have ‘favourable conditions’ (which, upon closer inspection of the
cited sources, are often in equatorial regions). In a few cases, it mentions geographical
regions like the Amazon and the Sahel, which would suffer disproportionally from certain
types of solar radiation management. Regarding the political representation of developing
countries, the report acknowledges that international decision-making is prone to excluding
or marginalising those who are particularly vulnerable and mentions procedural norms as a
way towards overcoming these difficulties. It also points out that transparency is an impor-
tant instrument to create legitimacy for research, stating that an independent international
or regional body would be required to assess the desirability of outdoor experimentation. It
then goes on, however, to suggest that regional and national levels might be more appropri-
ate in thinking about climate engineering governance.
Equity, fairness and justice is understood in this report mostly in terms of inter-gener-
ational equity, although reference is made to the prospect of ‘distributional conflicts’ that
might arise when it comes to cost-sharing and risk distribution associated with climate
engineering (Schäfer etal. 2015, p. 74). In one instance, the report mentions that ‘those
geographically and economically most vulnerable to climate change, often living at the
subsistence level, would be most likely affected by uneven effects of SAI [stratospheric
aerosol injection]’ (Schäfer etal. 2015, p. 77). Similarly, the issue of increasing food prices
is mentioned only twice in the context of land conversion and the use of bioenergy with
carbon capture and storage. Another fairness issue that the report briefly reflects upon is
compensation, essentially concluding that the attribution of cause and effect for a working
compensation mechanism would be short of impossible. Despite a number of these indirect
hints at risks and resources that might be particularly important for least developed coun-
tries, overall the report lacks attention for the inherent inequalities and power imbalances
that any large-scale climate engineering endeavour would entail.
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Compared with the European EuTRACE report, the National Academy of Sciences
report places carbon dioxide removal techniques more explicitly into the context of cli-
mate change mitigation and adaptation. It also takes a much less critical stance concern-
ing feasibility and potential side effects of this technology group, repeatedly writing that
many forms of carbon dioxide removal are benign and do not pose novel risks or govern-
ance issues. Its estimates for the potential of such techniques to absorb carbon dioxide are
consistently higher than that of the EuTRACE report, and although it recognises that the
‘benign’ methods of afforestation and the use of bioenergy with carbon capture and stor-
age will require massive amounts of land and could create significant competition with
food production, the most outspoken criticism of the approach merely is that ‘land manage-
ment approaches—including afforestation, reforestation and bioenergy production—have
the potential to initiate debates over land use’ (McNutt et al. 2015a, p. 98). The special
interests or vulnerabilities of developing countries and least developed countries are not
addressed, although all carbon dioxide removal techniques are assessed on a global level
and repeatedly emphasise the tropics as an area of high potential.
Governance of carbon dioxide removal is omitted entirely, apart from suggestions for
national bodies that could play a role for governing research in the United States. Develop-
ing countries are only mentioned in the context of climate change posing a global chal-
lenge in which many nations will have to do their share. Most explicitly, the report states
that ‘the social context [of carbon dioxide removal] is less about understanding how one set
of actions affects the global climate or large numbers of people in the short term and more
about how to mobilise multiple nations to engage in a coordinated effort’ (McNutt et al.
2015a, p. 99).
Methods to modify the planet’s albedo are discussed in the second climate interven-
tion report by the National Academy of Sciences. Vulnerabilities of developing and least
developed countries are addressed in the context of a warming climate, stating that while
industrialised economies may be able to adapt to climate change, ‘the outlook is more pes-
simistic for the less industrialised societies and economies of the world, and grimmer still
for many natural terrestrial, aquatic and oceanic ecosystems’ (McNutt etal. 2015b, p. 20).
This vulnerability is used as one of the main reasons for which research on albedo modifi-
cation should be conducted, outlining a scenario in which crop failure in the tropics could
lead to ‘intense pressure to temporarily reduce temperatures to provide additional time for
adaptation’ and a possible ensuing deployment of albedo modification in the absence of
sufficient knowledge about the technology (McNutt etal. 2015b, p. 32).
Developing countries are not assigned an active role in this report. Instead, the United
States is portrayed as a norm entrepreneur that could provide a model for researchers and
funding agencies in other countries. It is assumed that only economically powerful coun-
tries could initiate an attempt at unilateral (‘unsanctioned’) albedo modification in the first
place, and China as well as India are discussed in terms of regional climate engineering.
Simultaneously, the report makes clear that ‘governance’ does not equate ‘regulation’ and
that a lack of explicit national or international regulation should not necessarily stand in
the way of smaller-scale research.
The ethical section of the report mentions the ‘additional ethics issues’ that arise from
the imposition of those who deploy albedo modification measures on those who have no
say and who may not favour the deployment. In the wake of this observation, the report
points out further need for research on who should have decision-making power and capac-
ity. The explicit inclusion of the ‘marginalised, vulnerable and voiceless populations’
described earlier and the need to consult them is not expressed.
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4.2 Documents fromworkshops held intheSouth
Several workshops on climate engineering have been held in developing countries in recent
years. How are the least developed countries and their interests framed in documents that
emerged from these few workshops? We analysed here in detail the content of reports that
have resulted from six workshops that focused on developing countries and/or that were
held in a developing country.
Africa In Africa, we studied three workshops on climate engineering that were organ-
ised in a collaborative effort of the African Academy of Sciences and the Solar Radiation
Management Governance Initiative: on 27 June 2012 in Dakar, Senegal, on ‘Governance
of Solar Radiation Management Research: African Perspectives’; on 28 September 2012
in Boksburg, South Africa, on ‘Solar Geoengineering: Research, Governance, and African
Involvement’, and on 14 January 2013 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on ‘African Involvement
in Solar Geoengineering’. All together, these workshops were attended by about hundred
participants from 21 African (mostly least developed) countries; most participants were
scientists. All workshops discussed solar radiation management only; their results were
summarised in a single report (African Academy of Sciences and Solar Radiation Manage-
ment Governance Initiative 2013). (We are not aware of comparable events in Africa on
carbon dioxide removal.)
The meetings all began with introductions to climate change in Africa (given by a South
Africa-based expert) and to the idea of solar radiation management (given by a United
Kingdom- or United States-based expert). The lectures were followed by an exercise with
pre-formulated scenarios, which participants were asked to rate on a scale from desired
facilitation to desired prohibition. Although participation was encouraged, the workshops
seemed to rely very much on the information presented by Northern experts to the audi-
ence, rather than fostering free engagement with various sources.
While different views were expressed during these exercises, several common themes
and concerns can be identified, most of which differ from the mainstream North Ameri-
can or European reports. First, participants highlighted several special African concerns,
notably the risks to African agriculture and regional differences in impacts. In addition,
participants stated that alternative approaches such as reforestation and afforestation are
not discussed sufficiently. Overall, the workshops revealed the widespread perception of
lack of capacity and knowledge in Africa to effectively engage in global debates on this
novel set of technologies. These concerns are reflected in the roles that participants foresee
for Africa, which are largely focused on African scientists as contributors in research pro-
grammes and as experts who inform their governments. The framing is likely to be influ-
enced by the selection of participants, who largely represented the African science commu-
nity with few government officials or civil society representatives involved.
Participants also expressed views about the modes of global governance that should
regulate the debate, if not deployment, of climate engineering technologies. For one, par-
ticipants saw an important role for African countries to continue pushing industrialised
countries to increase efforts towards decarbonisation, hence making climate engineering
unnecessary in the first place. In addition, the African discourse seems to suggest a prefer-
ence for strong global institutions, for instance an independent and transparent international
body to regulate outdoor solar radiation management experimentation, either through the
World Meteorological Organization, installed through the UN Security Council, or inde-
pendently. More generally, African experts argued in favour of a strong role of the Afri-
can Union; stronger facilitation by universities and governments for indoor research; full
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F.Biermann, I.Möller
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transparency of involved researchers and related funding mechanisms; and the bottom-up
involvement of developing countries.
Asia and Pacific In Asia, we study two expert workshops, the first of which was held in
2011 in Singapore on ‘Governing Geoengineering in the Twenty-first Century: Asian Per-
spectives’, organised by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies Centre for Non-
Traditional Security Studies, the Oxford Geoengineering Programme and the Solar Radia-
tion Management Governance Initiative (RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies
2011). The agenda of this small workshop on supposedly ‘Asian Perspectives’ was highly
dominated by speakers from the North, from the universities of Oxford, Leeds, Southamp-
ton and Tokyo, and the United States-based Environmental Defense Fund, with additional
videoconferencing with panel members of the British Royal Society. Asian experts seem to
have spoken in plenary only in one session on country perspectives, and a session on civil
society perspectives. The other participants of the workshop—only 13 names are listed—
are largely representatives from Singaporean agencies. Despite its broad title, by no means
can this workshop be characterised as a comprehensive, open discussion of perspectives
from Asia and the Pacific. The report that has been made available after the workshop
should hence be seen largely as a compilation of views from the experts from the United
Kingdom and the United States, possibly influenced by comments from the Singapore-
ans—but not as an original contribution of Asian perspectives.
A second event was held in New Delhi, India, in 2014, organised jointly by the Council
on Energy, Environment and Water (an Indian policy research institution) and the Insti-
tute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Given the strong role of the Indian organisers—and presumably the Council’s influential
chairperson, Suresh Prabhu, and other internationally leading Indian experts—the meet-
ing saw a much stronger presence and participation of Southern voices compared to the
other workshops held in developing countries. Possibly as a result, the workshop report
is more focused on considerations of equity and global justice, with the report’s summary
even ending with a statement to the effect that the principles of equity and common but
differentiated responsibilities ‘will be of concern to many countries involved in action
against anthropogenic climate change, including India’ (Council on Energy Environment
and Water 2014, p. 16). It also appears that the conference overall veered towards a more
critical stance vis-à-vis some of these technologies, arguing in the report among others
that, ‘Due to lack of opt-out option, issues in delineating research from deployment and
concerns of possible militarisation and regional destabilisation, few saw SAI [stratospheric
aerosol injection] as governable’ (Council on Energy Environment and Water 2014, p. 16).
In addition, one workshop—held in August 2013 in Suva, Fiji—addressed the situa-
tion of the Pacific islands (Beyerl and Maas 2014). The workshop was co-hosted by the
Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development at the University of the
South Pacific and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.
About 40 experts participated, a third of whom were faculty and students from the Pacific
Centre in Fiji. Other participants included representatives from science, civil society, reli-
gious organisations and governments in the region, along with four members of the United
States embassy and USAID. The workshop proceedings evidence a unidirectional flow of
information, with all substantive presentations being made by the German experts. Dis-
cussions with representatives from the region revealed a number of key concerns, nota-
bly the urge to focus, first, on mitigation, the need to adopt a precautionary approach and
for ‘regulatory and enforceable governance structures’ before any significant field testing
and implementation of climate engineering technologies’ can be done. Overall, experts in
Pacific island states seem to be largely uninformed and disconnected with the emerging
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climate engineering discourse in the North, and unprepared so far to develop a strong pol-
icy position.
5 Conclusions andpolicy implications
Climate engineering technologies are not yet developed and remain far from being
deployed. Yet, the current state of global climate governance has given rise to a new, rap-
idly growing discourse—one that may turn climate engineering into a legitimate climate
governance option. If deployed, climate engineering technologies are likely to have tremen-
dous impacts on developing countries. And yet, many climate engineering technologies
could be deployed by a limited group of industrialised countries without global consent.
All this makes the growing climate engineering discourse a vital policy issue for develop-
ing countries, especially the least developing countries where, in a few decades, one-fifth
of humanity might live.
Our analysis has shown that the pivotal importance of this issue is not reflected in a
strong and meaningful role of least developed countries in the current climate engineering
debate. Almost all expert workshops and conferences are held in the North, and almost all
experts involved are residents of a few industrialised countries. The few workshops in the
South that we identified are again largely dominated by speakers from a few industrialised
countries and often give the impression of a rather unidirectional flow of views from North
to South. A global discourse and epistemic community is taking shape that might chart the
way towards the largest purposeful alteration of planetary systems ever imagined by peo-
ple—yet this discourse is at present still driven and increasingly legitimized by only few
countries in the North.
What are then the policy options for least developed countries to raise their voice?
Recent history provides numerous examples where developing countries tried to gain con-
trol over new technologies developed in the North, and over the gains from novel resources
and industries. In most of these cases, control was eventually retained by the most powerful
countries that could exploit the resource or maintain the activity in question. It remains to
be seen whether the emerging field of climate engineering will be different. At present, we
see four avenues at the level of international politics along which least developed countries
could seek to increase their influence on discussions on, and possibly development of, cli-
mate engineering technologies.
(1) Increasing Control of Global Science Networks First, least developed countries
could seek a stronger role in the emerging epistemic communities on climate engineer-
ing. Governments and science institutions of least developed countries could request more
involvement in meetings and conferences, reports and briefings, including more financial
support to enable such participation. One example could be the IPCC model, in which
working groups generally have one co-chair from a Southern country (Biermann 2002).
While such increased participation might also lead to false impressions of legitimacy by
adding ‘a few Southern names’ without factually increasing the influence of Southern
experts, more participation might also help bring forward the concerns, interests and risks
that are most important from a least developed country perspective, including in discourses
that might shape the future governance modes on climate engineering.
(2) Calling for a Regulatory Authority in the United Nations System Given the vast
imbalances between North and South in terms of research facilities and scientific resources,
it is unlikely that Southern interests and voices will easily influence the debates on climate
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F.Biermann, I.Möller
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engineering as they are currently unfolding in the major academic centres in the North. For
that reason, governments of least developed countries could try to increase their influence
on the emerging discourses on climate engineering outside the confines of expert meet-
ings and scientific programmes. This would include raising the issue in the multilateral
institutions where their voice matters, notably the United Nations. One option could be the
establishment of a global control and approval mechanism that would regulate or ban all
unilateral activities in this domain pursued by individual states or private actors. Such a
mechanism could involve—as proposed for instance by African experts at workshops dis-
cussed above—a veto right of African countries on any decisions. It would also reflect
the suggestions of experts from the Pacific islands, who state that consultations with their
governments should be ‘mandatory, regardless of whether an individual country is a party
or member to any treaty instrument that would make decisions on climate engineering’
(Beyerl and Maas 2014, p. 16).
To advance a global approval mechanism under (largely) Southern control, governments
of least developed countries could table the issue in the United Nations General Assem-
bly, where they collectively combine about 25% of the votes. If joined by other developing
countries not classified as least developed countries, they could easily reach an absolute
majority. Pacific island experts have already indicated the need ‘to form a unified voice
and voting in assemblies like the UN’ on climate engineering (Beyerl and Maas 2014,
14), which is likely to quickly generate voting majorities in many multilateral institutions.
While the General Assembly cannot take binding decisions, its resolutions can have impor-
tant normative effects, representing public evidence of broad consensus on an issue. Simi-
larly, the General Assembly could express concerns with (certain elements) of the climate
engineering debate; decide on a global (non-binding) moratorium; or agree on the estab-
lishment of a Global Geoengineering Authority. Such measures would formally not require
the consent of the few technologically advanced countries that have the means to deploy
climate engineering technologies. While least developed countries cannot enforce a UN
declaration or multilateral agreement upon major industrialised powers, their organised
resistance, for instance by means of a UN General Assembly declaration, can exert pres-
sure that raises the political costs for any country that might consider unilateral deployment
of climate engineering technologies in the future.
(3) Taking Action through Multilateral Environmental Agreements Third, least devel-
oped countries could table the issue in the conferences of the parties to multilateral agree-
ments that might relate to this subject matter. An example of this already took place in
2010, when a coalition of oceanographers and advocates convinced the Convention on
Biological Diversity to limit experimentation on ocean fertilisation, the first carbon diox-
ide removal technology to be widely discussed. Following from this, parties to the 1972
Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Mat-
ter adopted an amendment that sets up a legally binding mechanism to regulate ocean fer-
tilisation and possibly other future marine climate engineering activities (Fuentes-George
2017). A similar pathway could be open to least developed countries also for other climate
engineering mechanisms and under other multilateral agreements.
(4) Taking Cases to the International Court of Justice Fourth, least developed countries
could push for a decision on the legality of the deployment of certain climate engineering
technologies before the International Court of Justice. A formal judgement is only possible
in a legal conflict among states where both states agree on adjudication of the Court—
which might be unlikely for conflicts around climate engineering. On the other hand, the
Court can issue advisory opinions if requested to do so by an international organisation,
such as the World Health Organization.
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These four policy options that we sketch might help developing countries, and in par-
ticular least developed countries, to regain control over their future with regard to the
emerging climate engineering discourse. We see an opportunity for them to take the lead
on climate engineering in all multilateral institutions where their voice counts and their
vote matters, from the UN General Assembly to the treaty bodies under environmental,
marine or outer space regimes. Injecting aerosols in the stratosphere or claiming large parts
of African land for carbon dioxide removal are not simply new technologies, the develop-
ment of which can be left to few experts, funders and companies in the former colonial
capitals in the North. Such approaches fundamentally affect the entire earth system and—if
something goes wrong—might threaten the life of millions of people, and especially the
poor. Urgent action at the multilateral level might be needed for developing countries to
increase their influence in this rapidly emerging debate.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna-
tional License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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