Problem addressing:
Science has been existing for more than a century and has been progressing since, making our social and domestic life easier and more convenience. But in every progressing, there is the other side of it, a black mirror. Science has their limitation, and in the progress of science, we are creating a future where life could be inhabitable. Global warming is the cause of science and should be address. Although this is one of the utmost important issue we face, many solutions are also being created to address the issue, one of them is geoengineering- the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.
Example illustrate this problem:
The possibility of carrying out a large-scale intervention to the Earth geography and atmosphere has emerge as a controversial addition to the many way of fixing climate change. Geoengineering comprise of science that: (1) Seek to remove extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (carbon engineering), or (2) Reflect a fraction of sunlight away from the Earth (solar engineering). Some of these ideas are beginning to be put onto the table; scientists and engineers have also beginning to design and conduct experiments to test the technical viability of those ideas. At this point, any proposal for geoengineering can be expected to be a controversial issue, either domestic or international level. No government is advocating and seriously examining geoengineering at the moment but this may change in the future in respond to the increasing concern about the sever of climate change; or when all other means of fighting climate change have been proven to be not successful.
There are several studies on how public view on the subject acceptability, whereas testing a science subject in such a scale brings uncertainty and would be hard to gain public acceptant. One of the methods of solar engineer include increasing the amount of aerosols in the stratosphere, which could scatter incoming solar heat away from Earth’s surface, or ocean iron fertilization, which help remove the extra carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Base on it, clearly the size of the scale and the complexity of this kind of test on climate processes make these ideas a raising concern. There are four major area of consideration regarding the acceptability of geoengineering experiments: (1) the degree of containment; (2) the uncertainty surrounding experimental outcomes; (3) the reversibility of impacts; and (4) the scientific purity of the enterprise. These areas of concern need to be address and intervention can be made to support and make geoengineering a possible and safe practice.
Intervention being propose:
What is it?
There are few experience that have tested new or unfamiliar technologies in the open have attracted a significant degree of public interest and media scrutiny. However, most of the public interest is in the design and conduct of geoengineering experiments and on the definition of acceptable and unacceptable geoengineering research. One of such way, as proven in deliberative workshops undertaken for the SPICE project testbed, suggested public support for greater transparency in research funding decisions, open publication of results, and new international governance and regulatory structures (Pidgeon et al., 2013).
While geoengineering is not currently part of the policy discourse, interest in it may grow in the medium term as climate change becomes a more mainstream concern, and especially if mitigation and adaptation measures are seen to be failing to prevent dangerous climate change.
In order to make geoengineering to be an effective solution to climate change, effective governance of scientific research and technical experimentation are an intensive required in this area. Deliberative workshops undertaken for the SPICE project testbed, for instance, suggested public support for greater transparency in research funding decisions, open publication of results, and new international governance and regulatory structures (Pidgeon et al., 2013). Focus groups on solar geoengineering have stressed the need for public confidence on at least five fronts: in climate science as a reliable guide to policy; in the ability of research to predict side effects; in the ability of research to demonstrate efficacy; in effective research governance; and in the capacity of democratic institutions to accommodate solar geoengineering technologies (Macnaghten and Szerszynski, 2013; Merk et al., 2015). . Government-sponsored public engagement exercises on geoengineering proposals have elicited concerns about the controllability, reversibility, and cost-efficiency of different geoengineering options (NERC, 2010). Public appraisals of geoengineering proposals against other options for tackling climate change have led to three criteria for good governance: greater reflexivity in the articulation of geoengineered futures, the prioritization of broadly ‘robust’ options and decisions over narrowly ‘optimal’ ones, and the need to satisfactorily engage concerned publics before declaring geoengineering a legitimate object of scientific governance (Bellamy et al., 2016; Bellamy, 2016).
What does it look like?
There are four non-technical characteristics of geoengineering which might influence an appropriate governance regime.
(1) Relationship between geoengineering and mitigation
There are three reasons for seeing geoengineering as just one element in a package. First, it is clearly sensible not to put all our eggs in one basket, particularly as we do not yet know how well geoengineering techniques will work. Second, without eventual curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, the scale and duration of a geoengineering intervention will have to continue to grow, at increasing expense and risk of side-effects. Third, techniques which rely on increasing the Earth’s albedo might balance global warming, but will not address other negative consequences of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, such as oceanic acidification.
(2) Number of actors needed for a geoengineering intervention
(3) Externalities, risks and distributional issues
Possible side effects are an inevitable concern for any deployment of geoengineering techniques, particularly given the preliminary nature of much research in the field to date. Geo-engineering options remain largely speculative and unproven, and with the risk of unknown side effects. These distributional issues – between countries, and between groups – could raise questions of compensation, as well as political and legal issues of liability, which will need to be addressed by a governance regime (or through litigation). These issues would be particularly problematic in the case of a geoengineering intervention by one country, or a group of countries. This strengthens the case for seeking the explicit agreement of all countries through a UN-led, multilateral process.
(4) Geoengineering as a long-term undertaking
A geoengineering intervention is likely to require action over an extended period. Techniques such as ocean fertilization and stratospheric sulfur injection would require continuing input; space barriers, once in place, would require monitoring and occasional repositioning as they strayed from the optimal position (Angel 2006).
Equally importantly, any such intervention would be, by definition, experimental. It might require to be adjusted as its effectiveness, and side-effects, became better understood. Eventually, a decision would need to be made on shutting down the intervention. A governance regime would therefore need to include a facility for dynamic management and timely decision-making. Thompson (2006) discusses adaptive management for climate change mitigation and adaptation, concluding that ‘its experimental, top-down characteristics are not politically feasible at the international level’. For example, adaptive management requires experimentation with a range of approaches, meaning that some actors end up by definition pursuing sub-optimal policies. It is unlike that, in the absence of coercion, any sovereign state would be willing to pursue climate policies which delivered sub-optimal results for its own population in the interests of the wider global community. Thompson suggests instead some ways of mimicking adaptive management. However, some of the problems he identifies apply less clearly to a geoengineering intervention conducted by a single actor, where no individual country need be saddled with having to pursue sub-optimal policies. Adaptive management would be a particularly attractive approach for a geoengineering intervention: ‘dealing with uncertainty, ever changing circumstances and incomplete science is, of course, the specialty of an adaptive management approach’ (Thompson 2006).
A geoengineering regime would therefore need to combine durability (including of funding commitments) with the ability to take timely decisions which respond to changing circumstances and knowledge. MacCracken (2006) argues that ‘it seems rather unlikely that a global coalition of nations could be kept together to sustain such a diversion of resources’ over such a long time-frame.