Publications

Solar geoengineering (SG) may be a helpful tool to reduce harms from climate change, yet further research into its potential benefits and risks must occur prior to any implementation. So far, however, organized research on SG has been absent from the U.S. national policy agenda. We apply the Multiple Streams Approach analytical framework to explain why a U.S. federal SG research program has failed to materialize up to now, and to consider how one might emerge in the future. We argue that establishing a federal program will require the formation of an advocacy coalition within the political arena that is prepared to support such a policy objective. A coalition favoring federal research on SG does not presently exist, yet the potential nucleus of a future political grouping is evident in the handful of ‘pragmatist’ environmental organizations that have expressed conditional support for expanded research.

Solar geoengineering (SG) entails using technology to modify the Earth's radiative balance to offset some of the climate changes caused by long‐lived greenhouse gases. Parametric insurance, which delivers payouts when specific physical indices (such as wind speed) cross predefined thresholds, was recently proposed by two of us as a compensation mechanism for SG with the potential to ease disagreements about the technology and to facilitate cooperative deployment; we refer to this proposal as reduced‐rate climate risk insurance for solar geoengineering, or ‘RCG’. Here we probe the plausibility of RCG by exploring the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative (PCRAFI), a sovereign risk pool providing parametric insurance coverage against tropical cyclones and earthquakes/tsunamis to Pacific island countries since 2013. Tracing the history of PCRAFI and considering regional views on insurance as compensation necessitates reconfiguring RCG in a way that shifts the focus away from bargaining between developed and developing countries toward bargaining among developed countries. This revised version of RCG is challenged by an assumption of broad developed country support for sovereign climate insurance in the developing world, but it also better reflects the underlying incentive structure and distribution of power.

Theorists of transnational climate governance (TCG) seek to account for the increasing involvement of nonstate and substate actors in global climate policy. While transnational actors have been present in the emerging field of solar geoengineering—a novel technology intended to reflect a fraction of sunlight back to space to reduce climate impacts—many of their most significant activities, including knowledge dissemination, scientific capacity building, and conventional lobbying, are not captured by the TCG framework. Insofar as TCG is identified with transnational governance and transnational governance is important to reducing climate risks, an incomplete TCG framework is problematic for effective policy making. We attribute this shortcoming on the part of TCG to its exclusive focus on steering and corollary exclusion of influence as a critical component of governance. Exercising influence, for example, through inside and outside lobbying, is an important part of transnational governance—it complements direct governing with indirect efforts to inform, persuade, pressure, or otherwise influence both governor and governed. Based on an empirical analysis of solar geoengineering research governance and a theoretical consideration of alternative literatures, including research on interest groups and nonstate advocacy, we call for a broader theory of transnational governance that integrates steering and influence in a way that accounts for the full array of nonstate and substate engagements beyond the state.

Solar geoengineering appears capable of reducing climate change and the associated risks. In part because it would be global in effect, the governance of solar geoengineering is a central concern. The Earth System Governance (ESG) Project includes many researchers who, to varying degrees, utilize a common vocabulary and research framework. Despite the clear mutual relevance of solar geoengineering and ESG, few ESG researchers have considered the topic in substantial depth. To stimulate its sustained uptake as a subject within the ESG research program, we identify significant contributions thus far by ESG scholars on the subject of solar geoengineering governance and survey the wider solar geoengineering governance literature from the perspective of the new ESG research framework. Based on this analysis, we also suggest specific potential lines of inquiry that we believe are ripe for research by ESG scholars: nonstate actors’ roles, polycentricity, public engagement and participation, and the Anthropocene.

Consideration of solar geoengineering as a potential response to climate change will demand complex decisions. These include not only the choice of whether to deploy solar engineering, but decisions regarding how to deploy, and ongoing decisionmaking throughout deployment. Research on the governance of solar geoengineering to date has primarily engaged only with the question of whether to deploy. We examine the science of solar geoengineering in order to clarify the technical dimensions of decisions about deployment – both strategic and operational – and how these might influence governance considerations, while consciously refraining from making specific recommendations. The focus here is on a hypothetical deployment rather than governance of the research itself. We first consider the complexity surrounding the design of a deployment scheme, in particular the complicated and difficult decision of what its objective(s) would be, given that different choices for how to deploy will lead to different climate outcomes. Next, we discuss the on-going decisions across multiple timescales, from the sub-annual to the multi-decadal. For example, feedback approaches might effectively manage some uncertainties, but would require frequent adjustments to the solar geoengineering deployment in response to observations. Other decisions would be tied to the inherently slow process of detection and attribution of climate effects in the presence of natural variability. Both of these present challenges to decision-making. These considerations point toward particular governance requirements, including an important role for technical experts – with all the challenges that entails.

States will disagree about deployment of solar geoengineering, technologies that would reflect a small portion of incoming sunlight to reduce risks of climate change, and most disagreements will be grounded in conflicting interests. States that object to deployment will have many options to oppose it, so states favouring deployment will have a powerful incentive to meet their objections. Objections rooted in opposition to the anticipated unequal consequences of deployment may be met through compensation, yet climate policy is inhospitable to compensation via liability. We propose that multilateral parametric climate risk insurance might be a useful tool to facilitate agreement on solar geoengineering deployment. With parametric insurance, predetermined payouts are triggered when climate indices deviate from set ranges. We suggest that states favouring deployment could underwrite reduced-rate parametric climate insurance. This mechanism would be particularly suited to resolving disagreements based on divergent judgments about the outcomes of proposed implementation. This would be especially relevant in cases where disagreements are rooted in varying levels of trust in climate model predictions of solar geoengineering effectiveness and risks. Negotiations over the pricing and terms of a parametric risk pool would make divergent judgments explicit and quantitative. Reduced-rate insurance would provide a way for states that favour implementation to demonstrate their confidence in solar geoengineering by underwriting risk transfer and ensuring compensation without the need for attribution. This would offer a powerful incentive for states opposing implementation to moderate their opposition.

Solar geoengineering has received increasing attention as an option to temporarily stabilize global temperatures. A key concern is that heterogeneous preferences over the optimal amount of cooling combined with low deployment costs may allow the country with the strongest incentive for cooling, the so-called free-driver, to impose a substantial externality on the rest of the world. We analyze whether the threat of counter-geoengineering technologies capable of negating the climatic effects of solar geoengineering can overcome the free-driver problemand tilt the game in favour of international cooperation. Our game-theoreticalmodel of countries with asymmetric preferences allows for a rigorous analysis of the strategic interaction surrounding solar geoengineering and counter-geoengineering.We find that countergeoengineering prevents the free-driver outcome, but not always with benign effects. The presence of counter-geoengineering leads to either a climate clash where countries engage in a non-cooperative escalation of opposing climate interventions (negative welfare effect), a moratorium treaty where countries commit to abstain from either type of climate intervention (indeterminate welfare effect), or cooperative deployment of solar geoengineering (positivewelfare effect).We show that the outcome depends crucially on the degree of asymmetry in temperature preferences between countries.

Some scientists suggest that it might be possible to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight back into space to reduce climate change and its impacts. Others argue that such solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering is inherently incompatible with democracy. In this article, we reject this incompatibility argument. First, we counterargue that technologies such as SRM lack innate political characteristics and predetermined social effects, and that democracy need not be deliberative to serve as a standard for governance. We then rebut each of the argument’s core claims, countering that (1) democratic institutions are sufficiently resilient to manage SRM, (2) opting out of governance decisions is not a fundamental democratic right, (3) SRM may not require an undue degree of technocracy, and (4) its implementation may not concentrate power and promote authoritarianism. Although we reject the incompatibility argument, we do not argue that SRM is necessarily, or even likely to be, democratic in practice.

Interstate compensation for climate change based on legal liability faces serious obstacles. Structural incongruities related to causation, time, scope, and scale impede application of tort law to climate change, while political opposition from developed countries prevents intergovernmental consideration of liability as a means of compensating for climate damages. Insurance, however, in particular parametric insurance triggered by objective environmental indices, is emerging as a promising alternative to liability. This is manifest in the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, which ruled out recourse to legal liability, and in the formation and expansion of regional sovereign climate risk insurance schemes in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific. Theory and early practice suggest that parametric insurance exhibits five key advantages compared to legal liability in the climate change context: (1) it does not require that causation be demonstrated; (2) it has evolved to provide catastrophic coverage; (3) it is oriented toward the future rather than the past; (4) it is contractual, rather than adversarial, in nature; and (5) it provides a high degree of predictability. Compensation based on parametric insurance represents a novel climate policy option with significant potential to advance climate politics.

Increasing interest in climate engineering in recent years has led to calls by the international research community for international research collaboration as well as global public engagement. But making such collaboration a reality is challenging. Here, we report the summary of a 2016 workshop on the significance and challenges of international collaboration on climate engineering research with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Because of the region’s interest in benefits and risks of climate engineering, there is a potential synergy between impact research on anthropogenic global warming and that on solar radiation management. Local researchers in the region can help make progress toward better understanding of impacts of solar radiation management. These activities can be guided by an ad hoc Asia-Pacific working group on climate engineering, a voluntary expert network. The working group can foster regional conversations in a sustained manner while contributing to capacity building. An important theme in the regional conversation is to develop effective practices of dialogues in light of local backgrounds such as cultural traditions and past experiences of large-scale technology development. Our recommendation merely portrays one of several possible ways forward, and it is our hope to stimulate the debate in the region.

Proposed large-scale intentional interventions in natural systems in order to counter climate change, typically called “climate engineering” or “geoengineering,” stand to dramatically alter the international politics of climate change and potentially much more. There is currently a significant and growing literature on the international politics of climate engineering. However, it has been produced primarily by scholars from outside the discipline of International Relations (IR). We are concerned that IR scholars are missing a critical opportunity to offer insights into, and perhaps help shape, the emerging international politics of climate engineering. To that end, the primary goal of this paper is to call the attention of the IR community to these developments. Thus, we offer here an overview of the existing literature on the international politics of climate engineering and a preliminary assessment of its strengths and lacunae. We trace several key themes in this corpus, including problem structure, the concern that climate engineering could undermine emissions cuts, the potentially “slippery slope” of research and development, unilateral implementation, interstate conflict, militarization, rising tensions between industrialized and developing countries, and governance challenges and opportunities. The international politics of climate engineering is then considered through the lenses of the leading IR theories (Realism, Institutionalism, Liberalism, and Constructivism), exploring both what they have contributed and possible lines of future inquiry. Disciplinary IR scholars should have much to say on a number of topics related to climate engineering, including its power and transformational potentials, the possibility of counter-climate engineering, issues of institutional design, international law, and emergent practices. We believe that it is incumbent on the IR community, whose defining focus is international relations, to turn its attention to these unprecedented technologies and to the full scope of possible ramifications they might have for the international system.