Recently a panel of experts have made recommendations that a commission be established as a step towards global governance of geoengineering programs, such as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), Stratospheric Aerosol Injections (SAI), Cloud Brightening, and similar.

Justification of this recommendation includes:

1. Failure to reduce green house gas emissions to optimal target levels.
2. Having already established global governance, tasked with overseeing and regulating the deployment of such technologies is necessary in case such technologies are needed in the future.
3. The effects of geoengineering programs directly impact on all sovereign nations, therefore global governance is needed to determine and legitimize decisions surrounding which nations will benefit from geoengineering programs and which nations will be sacrificed.

Deploying these technologies will result in increased mortality rates, and have damaging effects on human health, natural hydrological cycles, agriculture, weather, and the ozone layer. Moreover, deploying such technologies will greatly increase the number of stateless citizens who are already placing great strain on economies, social cohesion and political stability within sheltering nations.  

There is no commission or global body who holds, or should hold, such supreme power over nations and citizens of the world.  

Rather than global governance of geoengineering technolgoies, we call on the United Nations and all relevant stake holders to ban the deployment of geoengineering technologies and impose penalties of the severest kind for those found to be actively participating in such deployments. 

Concerned Citizens  

 More Information:

Governance of the Deployment of Solar Geoengineering https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/bios.pdf

The Need for Governance of Climate Geoengineering https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2017/need-governance-geoengineering/

Thematic Focus: Climate Change, Environmental Governance
Geoengineering to Combat Global Warming https://na.unep.net/geas/getuneppagewitharticleidscript.php?article_id=52