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Articles

A mission-driven research program on solar geoengineering could promote justice and legitimacy

Published online: 22 Nov 2019
 
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Over the past decade or so, several commentators have called for mission-driven research programs on solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management (SRM) or climate engineering. Building on the largely epistemic reasons offered by earlier commentators, this paper argues that a well-designed mission-driven research program that aims to evaluate solar geoengineering could promote justice and legitimacy, among other valuable ends. Specifically, an international, mission-driven research program that aims to produce knowledge to enable well-informed decision-making about solar geoengineering could (1) provide a more effective way to identify and answer the questions that policymakers would need to answer; and (2) provide a venue for more efficient, effective, just, and legitimate governance of solar geoengineering research; while (3) reducing the tendency for solar geoengineering research to exacerbate international domination. Thus, despite some risks and limitations, a well-designed mission-driven research program offers one way to improve the governance of solar geoengineering research relative to the ‘investigator-driven’ status quo.

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Author information

David R. Morrow

David R. Morrow is Director of Research for the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at American University and a Research Fellow with the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. He writes on normative issues in climate policy. His work on the ethics and governance of solar geoengineering has appeared in venues such as Ethics, Policy & Environment, Public Affairs Quarterly, Climatic Change, Environmental Research Letters, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. His most recent book, Values in Climate Policy, was published in 2019.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Zach Dove for a helpful discussion of these ideas, and to Catriona McKinnon and Steve Gardiner for helpful critical comments. The positions taken in this paper represent the author’s own views, and not those of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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