Risky climate techno-fixes blocked

In a landmark consensus decision, the 193-member United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) closed its 10th biennial meeting in Nagoya, Japan with a de facto moratorium on geo-engineering projects and experiments aimed at manipulating the Earth’s climate.

At the same time, an expert has again warned that man-made climate change has put the very foundations of human civilisation at stake.

Reacting to the CBD decision, the Canadian-founded non-governmental organisation ETC Group, which is dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights, said: “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus.”

The agreement, reached during the ministerial portion of the two-week meeting that included 110 environment ministers, asks governments to ensure that no geo-engineering activities take place until risks to the environment and biodiversity and associated social, cultural and economic impacts have been appropriately considered.

The CBD secretariat was instructed to report back on various geo-engineering proposals and potential intergovernmental regulatory measures.

The unusually strong consensus decision builds on the 2008 moratorium on ocean fertilisation. That agreement, negotiated at COP9 in Bonn, put the brakes on a litany of failed ‘experiments’ – both public and private – to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in the ocean depths by spreading nutrients on the sea surface.

Since then, attention has turned to a range of futuristic proposals to block a percentage of solar radiation via large-scale interventions in the atmosphere, stratosphere and outer space which would alter global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

“This decision clearly places the governance of geo-engineering in the United Nations where it belongs,” said ETC Group executive director, Pat Mooney.

“This decision is a victory for common sense, and for precaution. It will not inhibit legitimate scientific research.

“Decisions on geo-engineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving ‘voluntary guidelines’ on climate hacking. What little credibility such efforts may have had in some policy circles in the global North has been shattered by this decision,” he added.

“The [United Kingdom] Royal Society and its partners should cancel their Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative and respect that the world’s governments have collectively decided that future deliberations on geo-engineering should take place in the UN, where all countries have a seat at the table and where civil society can watch and influence what they are doing.”

Delegates in Nagoya have now clearly understood the potential threat that deployment – or even field testing – of geo-engineering technologies poses to the protection of biodiversity.

“Some delegations are understandably concerned that the interim definition of geo-engineering is too narrow because it does not include carbon capture and storage technologies. Before the next CBD meeting, there will be ample opportunity to consider these questions in more detail,” said Mooney.

“But climate techno-fixes are now firmly on the UN agenda and will lead to important debates as the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit approaches.

“A change of course is essential, and geo-engineering is clearly not the way forward,” he added.

In the interim, Dirk Messner, director of the German Development Institute, wrote in an article for openDemocracy.net: “The development of a global low-carbon economy to tackle climate change calls for accelerated innovation processes and a new quality of international co-operation – a challenge that is not as hopeless as we think.”

He argued that “only the threat of the Earth’s nuclear destruction provides an analogy with the climate crisis – with some major differences: Nuclear self-destruction was something that people, having seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could grasp and understand and, after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, became a very real threat. These perceptions may well have helped to avoid a nuclear confrontation.

“On the other hand, there are many robust mechanisms obstructing an effective response to climate change. A profound change to the Earth system far exceeds our imagination and our past experience.”

Messner stated that “climate change cannot be effectively contained without a global co-operation revolution. The still-available global greenhouse gas budget that would be compatible with limiting global warming to 2 °C is enough for only another 20 years or so, provided that emissions are stabilised at their 2008 levels.

“Without global co-operation, this distribution problem for climate policy cannot be solved. And without a global approach to the protection of the great forests, the 2 °C target is similarly unattainable.”

Piet Coetzer