Geoengineering : the ethical and social issues

Tese de doutoramento, Filosofia (Filosofia da Natureza e do Ambiente), Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2015

Since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), responses to address climate change have fallen within two major groups of strategies, namely: mitigation measures, which comprise all human interventions to reduce the anthropogenic forcing of the climate system, such as reducing greenhouse gas sources and emissions and enhancing greenhouse gas sinks, and adaptation measures, which include any adjustments made to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected impacts of climate change, with the aim of moderating harm or exploiting beneficial opportunities. However, another strategy to limit the impacts and consequences of climate change has been gaining ground over the past decade: the idea of geoengineering, commonly defined as the “deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (The Royal Society, 2009: 1). The self-assertive invasion of nature’s various domains, the scale and complexity of the technoscientific tasks involved, the unpredictable long-term impacts of geoengineering actions, and the huge uncertainties that these proposals raise point to a shift in the nature of human action that requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility. Through this dissertation I hope to offer a perspective from which the very nature of geoengineering proposals can be brought into question, so as to better focus on and deal with the fundamental issues that geoengineering proposals entail. Accordingly, the aim of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the far-reaching ethical and social implications of these proposals and, to that end, find an adequate vantage point from which to address the following research questions: Why is geoengineering becoming a part of the portfolio of response options to anthropogenic climate change? What ‘imaginaries’ of science and technology underlie geoengineering debates? How plausible are current geoengineering proposals? What are the expectations, the embedded values, and the ways of making sense of a geoengineered world? What kind of ethical framework can serve as a basis for assessing geoengineering proposals and inform policy responses to geoengineering governance?

European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC)