Europe’s Response to the Threat of Solar Geoengineering Must Uphold the Precautionary Principle and Strengthen Restrictive Governance
June 29, 2023
Geneva (CH) / Brussels (BE) — The European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy adopted on 28 June, 2023 a Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council laying out how the EU will address the growing impact of climate change and environmental degradation in the fields of peace, security, and defense.
In a short paragraph in this communication, the EU addresses the issue of solar radiation modification (also known as ‘solar geoengineering’), recalling the precautionary principle and highlighting the new risks to people and ecosystems as well as the ethical, legal, governance and political issues that these approaches imply.
Lili Fuhr, Director of CIEL’s Fossil Economy Program, comments:
“Solar geoengineering is highly controversial and speculative. It would indeed pose multiple new threats and geopolitical risks and is, therefore, rightly rising on the agenda of international policymakers in the EU and elsewhere.
The risks of large-scale interventions into the Earth’s natural systems to counteract some of the symptoms of global heating are high. We, therefore, welcome the European Union’s continued leadership in upholding the precautionary principle when it comes to highly speculative and disruptive technologies like geoengineering that have the potential to impact people and ecosystems on a planetary scale.
The IPCC has made it clear that solar radiation modification (SRM) would not address the root causes of the climate crisis and is not a solution to climate change. The IPCC also stated that, if implemented, SRM would introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well understood, and that large uncertainties and knowledge gaps are associated with the potential of solar radiation modification approaches to reduce climate change risks. (IPCC Working Group II, SPM)
More than 400 leading scientists from around the world have signed a call for a Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement to demand no public funding, no deployment, no patents, no experiments, and no support in international fora.
CIEL agrees with the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President Timmermans that no one should be allowed to experiment with our shared planet and future. We need a firm commitment from all governments to uphold the de-facto global moratorium on all geoengineering that governments agreed on in 2010 under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and reconfirmed several times since. Instead of betting on magical technofixes to try to suppress global heating, governments need to follow the science and uphold their obligations to rapidly reduce emissions through a full, funded, fair and fast phase-out of all fossil fuels. Governments already have the tools and answers they need to tackle the climate crisis. Betting on future technofixes creates dangerous distractions and delays the implementation of real solutions.
We call on the EU to ensure that any geoengineering governance debates do not provide legitimacy for approaches that are inherently ungovernable and dangerous and that these debates follow the precautionary principle of respecting the CBD moratorium and fundamental rights of those who would be affected by any outdoor experimentation or potential deployment.
A true sign of leadership in this space would be for the EU to join governments that are willing to ban solar geoengineering on their national territory, like Mexico, and – in line with the science – to support international efforts to establish effective and enforceable global governance that ensures no deployment, no outdoor experimentation, no technology development and no backing for solar geoengineering in international fora.”
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Media contact: Niccolò Sarno, Media Relations Specialist, press@ciel.org