U015
Standards to Fuel New Climate Solutions: Establishing an Ethical Framework for Climate Interventions

Session ID#: 161615

Session Description:
As stated in the most recent IPCC Report, meeting those emissions targets and global temperature goals of the Paris Agreement will require dramatic reductions in global CO2 emissions combined with the active removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.  

 

However, current technologies for active removal of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere are not nearly at the scale needed to reach net-zero emissions. Significant questions, both practical and ethical, remain as to the long-term storage of removed carbon-dioxide.  As a result, other potential climate-intervention technologies to mitigate warming are being researched and discussed in public and private sectors, including both Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies. These are largely untested and pose significant risks if implemented at scale. Like other past controversial areas of scientific exploration, such as human subject research, cloning, and nanotechnology, require an ethical governance structure. Similarly, new methods in CDR and SRM technologies are not exempt and should not move forward without an international ethical governance structure to allow globally acceptable risk-controlled testing, thus making such climate-intervention research controversial.    

 

This session will assess the landscape of ethical approaches to new scientific innovation and propose a framework for how the international scientific community should conduct ethical science-based methodologies for carbon removal and sequestration. It will also discuss pathways for the framework to be adopted and enforced at scale.

Index Terms:

0820 Curriculum and laboratory design [EDUCATION]
1620 Climate dynamics [GLOBAL CHANGE]
1694 Instruments and techniques [GLOBAL CHANGE]
6324 Legislation and regulations [POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES]

Primary Convener:  Brooks Hanson, American Geophysical Union, Washington, DC, United States
Conveners:  Billy M Williams, American Geophysical Union, Washington, DC, United States, Lisa J Graumlich, University of Washington Seattle Campus, Seattle, WA, United States and Guy P Brasseur, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
 
CONSIDERATIONS FOR AN ETHICAL FRAMEWORK FOR CLIMATE INTERVENTION RESEARCH IN SUPPORT OF PUBLIC SAFETY, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND CLIMATE JUSTICE (1195572)
Kelly Wanser, SilverLining, Washington, United States and Sarah J Doherty, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
 
A Path to Big Blue Carbon- ocean carbon dioxide removal at the gigaton scale (Invited) (1175144)
Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Department of Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry, Woods Hole, MA, United States
 
THE OCEAN MAY HELP US ADDRESS OUR CLIMATE CRISIS--BUT HOW WE PROCEED IS AS IMPORTANT AS THE RESULTS WE ACHIEVE (Invited) (1182633)
Margaret Leinen, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, United States, Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Department of Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry, Woods Hole, MA, United States, Kilaparti Ramakrishna, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, United States, Fei Chai, Second Institute of Oceanography, State Oceanic Administration, State Key Laboratory of Satellite Ocean Environment Dynamics, Hangzhou, China, Sarah Smith, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, Moss Landing, United States, Mark Wells, University of Maine, School of Marine Sciences, Orono, United States and Joo-Eun Yoon, University of Cambridge, Downing College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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