3 Need for regulation of geoengineering
34. The first question in our terms of reference
for this inquiry was: is there a need for international regulation
of geoengineering research and deployment and if so, what international
regulatory mechanisms need to be developed? The answer we received
split into two: some geoengineering techniques are already subject
to regulation; and as regards the remaining techniques the position
is not yet clear.
Geoengineering techniques currently
subject to regulation
35. The Royal Society pointed out that:
CDR technologies could mostly be adequately controlled
by existing national and international institutions and legislation.
Many of the technologies are closely related to familiar existing
technologies. Air capture technologies are very similar to those
of carbon capture and storage; and this is likely to be one of
the most environmentally benign technologies. Ocean fertilisation
techniques are currently being managed by the London Convention
on ocean dumping, under the London Protocol. The Convention of
Biological Diversity has also adopted a decision on ocean fertilisation
which is mostly consistent with that of the London Convention.
Biochar and BECS[73]
face similar regulatory issues to that of biofuels including life
cycle analysis, and land use management. Ecosystem impacts of
enhanced terrestrial weathering would be contained within national
boundaries. Methods of enhanced weathering involving oceanic dispersion
of the products would have trans-boundary effects, but may also
be able to be managed under the London Convention.[74]
36. John Virgoe in a recent article identified an
important shortcoming of the existing international systems of
regulation. He pointed out that "No existing treaty deals
explicitly with geoengineering. None of these treaties was drafted
with geoengineering in mind, and none of them clearly prohibits
or regulates relevant activities" but he considered that
they might provide "contexts in which a possible geoengineering
intervention might be regulated—or challenged.[75]
He pointed out that even the UNFCCC, the basic legal instrument
on climate change, did not address the possibility of intentional
attempts to change the climate, except for the "enhancement
of sinks and reservoirs". [76]
In our view this is not a defect that could or should be rectified
by excluding geoengineering from the ambit of these protocols
or erecting parallel arrangements for the purposes of regulating
geoengineering.
37. Instead, the existing regimes could be developed
to encompass geoengineering. Mr Virgoe could "see no good
reason not to encourage (carefully supervised) research in these
techniques" and "to ensure carbon accounting/trading
rules are crafted in a way which might include such activities
(once issues of safety, verification etc are taken into account)".[77]
Research Councils UK made a similar point. On the assumption that
geoengineering techniques, particularly CDR, were formally recognised
as contributing to climate change mitigation (that is, as part
of national commitments to international climate change agreements),
"such techniques will need linking to emission trading schemes
or other mechanisms that may evolve".[78]
38. The existing international regulatory arrangements
on climate change, such as UNFCCC, need to be developed to encompass
geoengineering techniques. We see a role for the Government. Through
its involvement in the existing international regulatory arrangements
such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and when
these instruments come up for revision we recommend that the Government
raise geoengineering, particularly those for Carbon Dioxide Removal
(CDR), and seek to develop, in conjunction with other governments,
the arrangements provided by these international instruments so
that they address research on, and deployment of, CDR geoengineering
techniques.
Geoengineering techniques currently
not subject to regulation
39. In contrast, regulatory regimes for many SMR
techniques have yet to be developed. Again the Royal Society summarised
the position:
For SRM technologies there are fewer existing
institutions that could manage research and development. Land
surface albedo modification could be managed under national regulatory
frameworks as there are unlikely to be major trans-boundary issues.
The oceanic cloud brightening technologies would not fall under
national jurisdiction and no existing international institutions
have a clear mandate, so modifications and extensions of existing
treaties (e.g. ENMOD) and institutions would be required. Existing
treaties governing the atmosphere and space (CLRTAP[79]
& OST)[80] would
similarly not be adequate to regulate stratospheric aerosols and
space mirrors. There is a risk that these methods could be applied
by an individual nation or corporation which highlights the need
for international regulation for deployment (and in some cases
research).[81]
Dr Blackstock pointed out that for SRM "we do
not have the appropriate regulatory mechanisms in place, and I
do not believe we have even a forum in which that discussion has
begun to occur".[82]
40. The Government appeared to share this view. It
told us that geoengineering was an emerging policy area and there
"were at present no international treaties or institutions
with sufficient mandate to regulate the broad range of possible
geoengineering activities" and that, while regulation of
some of the technologies might be feasible by employing or amending
existing treaties and protocols of international law, others—such
as atmosphere and space-based methods—"may require
new international mechanisms".[83]
We conclude that there is a gap in the regulatory framework
for geoengineering techniques, especially for SRM techniques.
41. But does this gap matter? There are three issues
which we consider are relevant:
a) whether there is a need for urgency;
b) the state of the science; and
c) public attitudes.
URGENCY
42. The Government considered that there was no urgency.
The Minister, Joan Ruddock MP, did not see geoengineering as a
priority for Government. She said that geoengineering techniques
were "far from being developed to the point of viability
at the moment".[84]
But the Government was keeping a "watching brief" on
the subject and did "things at a de minimis level".[85]
What it considered as urgent was "reducing greenhouse gas
emissions in this country, of legislating to that effect, and
of participating in the international discussions about trying
to arrive at a global deal".[86]
Indeed, she saw a danger in adopting Plan B[87]
(that is, research into geoengineering), "if that were even
feasible, which I would question, but the danger in adopting a
Plan B is that you do not apply yourself to Plan A, and the point
of Plan A is it is all entirely do-able."[88]
43. As we explained in a previous chapter, we have
disagreed strongly with the Government on the advisability of
investigating geoengineering as a fallback option, Plan B. Sir
David King directly addressed the concern that appears to inhibit
the Government's view of geoengineering that it was a distraction
from the reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said that the major
effort had to be around defossilising economies, as that would
manage the anthropogenic (that is, human made) problem directly
rather than indirectly through geoengineering.[89]
He considered that, if "we [could] manage the transition
over the next 40 years into a defossilised economy", geoengineering
techniques might not be needed. It was, however, necessary:
to factor in the probability distribution functions
that the best science can deliver around what the temperature
rise for the planet will be even at a level [...] of 450 parts
per million of greenhouse gas CO2 equivalent in the
atmosphere. The best that science can tell us at the moment is
that the eventual temperature rise is going to lie somewhere between
1° Centigrade and 4° Centigrade with a peak in that
probability distribution function above 2° Centigrade, and
so we only have a 50 per cent chance of staying below a 2°
Centigrade rise. There is still, for example, a 20 per cent chance
that the temperature rise will be above 3.5° Centigrade,
and I am putting to you the idea that the 450 parts per million
figure is what we ought to aim for globally—it is the lowest
figure that is manageable—but even there we have to manage
risks by keeping in reserve an alternative way forward.[90]
Dr Maarten van Aalst took a similar view:
we need to be cautious of investing at too large
a scale to even give the impression that this is a suitable alternative
in the short-term to mitigation or [...] much more extensive capacity
building and adaptation, especially among the most vulnerable
groups [...] On the side of the risks, I agree that it is something
that we might want to have up our sleeves, and we are nowhere
near the level of certainty about what these different options
are that we could consider these options that we have at this
stage, so further research, in that sense, on a small scale to
get slightly further in our understanding would be important.[91]
44. Sir David saw a need to manage the acidification
of the oceans as the increase in carbon dioxide levels meant that
more carbonic acid formed in the oceans. The oceans were "part
of the ecosystem services for humanity. It is the oceans that
provide the beginning of the food chain" and he saw a need
to invest research in carbon dioxide removal from the oceans and
for prior regulation particularly on ocean removal.[92]
45. Dr Blackstock considered that in spite of the
limitations and risks "avoiding SRM research would be a mistake".[93]
He pointed out that the ability to influence rapidly the climate
meant SRM might be the only recourse should a climate crisis materialise.
Since severe climate change could bring about such national or
regional crises within decades, he considered that "prudence
suggests we should improve our understanding of the likely feasibility,
effectiveness and dangers of SRM interventions" and that
without prior research "uninformed and rash unilateral action
by less responsible actors becomes more likely".[94]
Moreover, near-term authoritative research would help "discredit
ungrounded fringe claims that SRM could provide an alternative
to dramatic near-term emission reductions" and he added that
"establishing good governance of SRM requires good understanding
of the schemes and risks to be governed, which first requires
research".[95]
46. Both Professor Keith[96]
and Dr Blackstock made the point that SRM technologies appeared
to be relatively cheap and therefore relatively technically simplistic.[97]
Dr Blackstock explained that this was:
because most of the technologies required to
actually deploy solar radiation management are things that are
available to numerous countries already. These are not technologies
that require huge technological progress from where existing technologies
are at. The idea that we can potentially regulate and control
the technology underlying solar radiation management, like we
do, or attempt to do, with nuclear technologies, is not a good
analogy for this. The technology is going to proliferate and be
accessible to a large number of individuals or countries and,
therefore, we have to look at controlling behaviours in this case,
not just access to technology.[98]
47. The Sustainability Council of New Zealand put
to us a scenario for unilateral action where one region was significantly
affected by climate change and felt the international community
was responding too slowly. The Council pointed out that developing
nations would in general suffer soonest from the more serious
effects of climate change and it envisaged that a small group
of developing countries could deploy reflection schemes shifting
the balance of power such that the pace of climate change responses
in general would tend to better align with those countries' preferences.[99]
48. Nor is geoengineering confined to modelling and
the distant future. Professor Keith told us that the Russians
were already carrying out testing,[100]
though Dr Blackstock added that the Russian tests were "extremely
subscale".[101]
Professor Keith also explained that it was becoming urgent to
undertake tests into stratospheric geoengineering as it had become
clear that the main method that had been considered did not work.
He explained that if sulphur was put in the stratosphere the way
scientists have been assuming, it did not do what they expected.
Tests were necessary and these would have "no detectable
climate effect, but they would be subscale tests, and if we want
to actually understand whether this technology works or it does
not, we need to do those tests relatively soon".[102]
49. The Government's focus on Plan A—the reduction
of the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—is
an approach that is becoming increasingly untenable as geoengineering
testing is already beginning and SRM techniques are within the
reach of a growing number of nations. Nor is its aversion to geoengineering
on the grounds that it will distract from Plan A evidence-based.
An equally plausible view is that, if the Government were to focus
more than at present on geoengineering, it would persuade more
people that the threat of global warming was serious and needed
to be addressed. In this regard Sir David King made a telling
point that "knowing the nature of the possible challenges
in the future—[for example one country using geoengineering
to divert another's monsoon]—is a very sobering way of managing
the business of defossilising".[103]
We recommend that the Government review its policy on geoengineering
to give it greater priority.
GEOENGINEERING IS TOO UNPREDICTABLE
50. An argument made by some against geoengineering
is that climate systems are already unpredictable and contain
much "noise" and that, as the ETC Group stated, "for
any research activities on geoengineering techniques to have a
noticeable impact on the climate, they will have to be deployed
on a massive scale, and thus any unintended consequences are also
likely to be massive".[104]
John Virgoe weighed up the issues:
The state of knowledge about geoengineering,
both on the technical side but also on the political, ethical
and regulatory sides, is simply not at a point where I think any
sensible person would be able to recommend that we should be implementing
a geoengineering technique at this point. I think, however, there
is increasing reason to think that we may be heading that way
in the future. [It] depends to some extent on your degree of optimism
about whether the world will actually get on top of global warming
through the mitigation methods and through international negotiations.
If we believe that we may be heading in that direction and that
in some years from now [...] we may be looking seriously at a
geoengineering intervention, I think it does make sense for us
to be starting, at this point, not only to research the science
and the technology, but also to think through some of these issues
around the politics and the regulation so that when we do get
to the point [...] we are in a position to take a mature, measured
and informed decision.[105]
51. Dr Blackstock considered that because stratospheric
aerosols and cloud whitening were the only category of techniques
that could be used with a rapid impact on the climate system there
was a need to get regulatory structures in place before large
scale field tests were started.[106]
He said that field experiments designed to have demonstrably negligible
environmental and trans-boundary risks were valuable for feasibility
testing deployment technologies, and for exploring local-scale
physical, chemical and biological interactions that could damage
the environment when scaled up.[107]
Dr Blackstock explained that once "you start running into
the potential for transboundary impacts, or at least a perception
of transboundary impacts, and so international mistrust, international
concern of what another country will do with that technology can
come up very rapidly".[108]
Professor Keith added that "governance is central at the
point where we lock it, and the reason is that it is so cheap
that the challenge for the international system will be to restrain
unilateral action".[109]
52. Beyond the small test, Dr Blackstock said that
robust understanding of SRM would eventually require tests with
demonstrable climatic impacts and that confidence in SRM climate
model predictions could only come from "poking" the
climate system and comparing the predicted and observed responses.
But due to the natural complexity and variability of the climate
system, "signal-to-noise issues will plague the attribution
of climatic impacts and unintended consequences to a particular
test" and that for "any SRM scheme it might prove impossible
to test for most impacts with 'pokes' below a scale considered
(at least politically) to constitute deployment of a low-level
climatic intervention".[110]
53. There is a wider issue. For understandable reasons
there is a tendency to approach regulation of geoengineering as
we do reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, which requires action
by many parties. Reduction of emissions requires global action
with a global impact. By contrast, as John Virgoe has pointed
out, some geoengineering techniques only require local action
to have a global impact—one possible example, would be the
release of stratospheric aerosols. The regulatory regime applying
to a geoengineering technique does not need to be so extensive
as that for the reduction of emissions. It could focus on setting
targets, managing a process and cost-sharing. This reduces the
complexity of the governance task, while simultaneously reducing
the need for a universal process, though wide participation would
remain strongly desirable on ethical and political grounds.[111]
CONCLUSIONS ON THE NEED FOR THE
REGULATION OF GEOENGINEERING
54. The science of geoengineering is not sufficiently
advanced to make the technology predictable, but this of itself
is not grounds for refusing to develop regulatory frameworks,
or for banning it. There are good scientific reasons for allowing
investigative research and better reasons for seeking to devise
and implement some regulatory frameworks, particularly for those
techniques that a single country or small group of countries could
test or deploy and impact the whole climate.
55. We conclude that there is a need to develop
a regulatory framework for geoengineering. Two areas in particular
need to be addressed: (i) the existing international regulatory
regimes need to develop a focus on geoengineering and (ii) regulatory
systems need to be designed and implemented for those SRM techniques
that currently fall outside any international regulatory framework.
Public attitudes
56. The Royal Society said in its report that the
acceptability of geoengineering would be determined as "much
by social, legal and political issues as by scientific and technical
factors".[112]
The Minister told us that it was not for the Government to encourage
a debate on the social acceptability of geoengineering, because
that presumed that the Government had taken a view that geoengineering
was a good thing, and that it should be deployed. The Government
had not, however, taken that view. The Minister considered it
was "important to involve the public in discussions as these
things develop".[113]
She was "alive to the fact that there would need to be public
engagement" and pointed out that the Natural Environment
Research Council "have a public dialogue programme that they
are about to launch. So it is important to talk with the public
and to avoid ignorance and prejudice, but at the same time, it
is not for the Government to persuade the public of the need for
this."[114]
57. Dr Adam Corner and Professor Nick Pidgeon, on
behalf of the Understanding Risk Research Group at Cardiff University,
said that a key consideration would be the public acceptability
of both specific geoengineering proposals themselves and the governance
arrangements set in place. They explained that
Research in the UK and elsewhere on the public
acceptance of the risks of new technologies (such as nuclear power
or biotechnology) shows clearly that people raise a range of generic
concerns about new technologies. These include concerns over:
long-term uncertainties; who will benefit; arrangements for control
and governance; and who to trust to regulate any risks. Geoengineering
is unlikely to be any different in this regard.
[W]ork on the technical feasibility of geoengineering
should not begin prior to a thorough evaluation of governance
arrangements for research. Our most fundamental concern is that
a programme of public engagement should be an important component
feeding into governance and research priorities. Thus, the
first challenge for geoengineering governance is to pursue an
international programme of upstream public engagement.[115]
58. While we welcome the work that NERC is doing
on public engagement on geoengineering, we find the Government's
approach unduly cautious. In part this appears to be a product
of its view that geoengineering is a distraction from reducing
carbon emissions, which, as we have already discussed, is not
an evidence based approach and does not recognise some of the
alternatives in pay-off of government support for geoengineering.
We recommend that the Government give greater priority to public
engagement on geoengineering by, for example, showing how it relates
to its policy on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. We
welcome the work of Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
on public engagement on geoengineering and we request that, when
the work is completed, the Government provide our successor committee
with an explanation of how it will inform its policy on geoengineering.
73 Biomass with carbon sequestration. Back
74
Ev 52, para 13; see also Q 8 [Dr Blackstock] Back
75
J Virgoe, "International governance of a possible geoengineering
intervention to combat climate change", Climatic Change,
2009, 95:103-119, para 3 Back
76
As above Back
77
Ev 5, para 8 Back
78
Ev 24, para 16 Back
79
The 1979 onvention on Long-range Trans-boundary Air Pollution Back
80
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty Back
81
Ev 53, para 14 Back
82
Q 9 Back
83
Ev 19 Back
84
Q 51; see also Q 58 Back
85
Q 58 Back
86
Q 51 Back
87
See paragraph Error! Reference source not found. above. Back
88
Q 56 Back
89
Q 34 Back
90
Q 34; see also Ev 45 [Sustainability Council of New Zealand] Back
91
Q 35 Back
92
Q 39 Back
93
Ev 2, para 11 Back
94
As above Back
95
As above Back
96
Q 17 Back
97
Q 18 [Dr Blackstock] Back
98
Q 18 Back
99
Ev 45 Back
100
Q 27; see also Ev 3 [Dr Blackstock], para 15 Back
101
Q 27 Back
102
As above Back
103
Q 40 Back
104
Ev 50, para 13 Back
105
Q 6 Back
106
Q 8 Back
107
Ev 3, para 15 Back
108
Q 8 Back
109
Q 12 Back
110
Ev 3, para 17 Back
111
J Virgoe, "International governance of a possible geoengineering
intervention to combat climate change", Climatic Change,
2009, 95:103-119, para 2.2 Back
112
The Royal Society, Geoengineering the climate Science, governance
and uncertainty, September 2009, p ix Back
113
Q 65 Back
114
Q 65 Back
115
Ev 41, paras 1-2 Back
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