David Morrow, Robert
Kopp, and Michael Oppenheimer, in Environmental
Research Letters, have called for establishing an International Climate
Engineering Research Review Board – an IRB for efforts to engineer the planet. I
concur. Geoengineering must be subject to global review and regulation. This
entails two challenges: (1) what rules should the IRB enforce; and (2) how
should it be organized. Here are eight thoughts:
1) The Geoengineering IRB must insist on sound
research grounded in reliable scientific evidence and theories and also
realistic scenarios of climate change. Geoengineering research cannot be
justified by high climate impacts alone but only by identifying a realistic
scenario of climate impacts coupled to realistic appraisal of the ability of
geoengineering to reduce or prevent those impacts. Otherwise, we’re just
shooting in the dark and hoping not to hit anyone.
2) The IRB must operate in a precautionary mode.
IRBs often work for institutions with a vested financial and reputational interest
in the success of research, and their members are researchers who often want to
avoid conflicts with their colleagues. Hence,
IRBs approach their job as not to block research but to help researchers
conduct their work in an ethically reasonable fashion. The joke about many IRBs
is that they’ve never met a research project they didn’t approve. That’s not
good enough in this case. A Geongineering IRB must block unjustified and
unethical research.
3) Clear rules for public consent must be
developed and enforced. No matter how well constructed an IRB, its job is to
supplement, not replace, the judgment of people being experimented upon. Since
individual consent for the whole planet is unwieldy, group consent procedures will
have to be developed. But what process of group consent? This is not an easy
question. Getting the consent of governmental representatives is inadequate,
and serious proposals must be made and debated by the global community
regarding how the consent of global publics could be obtained.
4) The IRB should include a broad membership. Diversity
should include geographic, ethnic, disciplinary, economic, cultural, and
religious considerations. It should include geoengineering researchers, climate
scientists, ecologists, economists, social scientists, and humanists. It should
include experts, lay people, public officials, and representatives of the
business sector and non-governmental organizations. We’re talking about some of
the most serious decisions the planet will make regarding its future. Such
decisions must take into account a wide range of knowledges and perspectives.
5) Climate risks should not be taken out of their
larger environmental and human contexts. Consider geoengineering experiments in
the 1960s to alter the direction of hurricanes in the Caribbean to avoid hurricanes
charging every fall at Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans. The experiments didn’t
work, but that wasn’t why they were discontinued. Someone finally realized that
roughly half of the annual rainfall in Southeastern states comes from
hurricanes. Driving them out to sea would have caused protracted, long-term
drought for the region. Climatic variables often exhibit complex and dynamic
relationships with human systems, with both current and geoengineered climate
trajectories exhibiting winners and losers, risks and benefits. Even diverting
Katrina from New Orleans to the east would simply have displaced its destructiveness
into Florida, Alabama and Georgia.
6) Geoengineering experiments must be evaluated
case-by-case. Too frequently, the case for geoengineering research is made in
the aggregate. Wouldn’t it be prudent, advocates ask, to pursue geoengineering
research to reduce uncertainties that surround it? Far from it. Prudence
demands, at best, pursuing some geoengineering experiments, but certainly not
others. As I suggested above, a key question for the IRB will be sorting out
which research to pursue and which to avoid.
7) Geoengineering should follow the European
Union’s approach to large, internationally diverse research teams. If
researchers can’t figure out how to convince colleagues and institutions from
other countries to participate, then it needs better thinking. There are lots
of ways geoengineering could go wrong. It could be done for financial gain
rather than public good. It could be parochially oriented toward solving one
country’s perceived problems at the expense of another’s. It could simply be
too risky or too experimental or inadequately well thought through and
designed. Ensuring broad, international teams of researchers, including
especially researchers from countries that are likely to experience potential
risks from the research, would go far toward generating global credibility for
geoengineering research and ensuring that multiple scientific and socio-cultural
perspectives were given due weight in its design.
8) Finally, the IRB should insist on recent
precedent from the US National Science Foundation and include explicit
evaluation of the social and ethical implications of large-scale research
projects and the inclusion of social science and humanities researchers as
partners in the research teams.
