Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA
COLLEGE OF FORESTRY AND CONSERVATION
MISSOULA,MT 59812
Performing Department
College of Forestry and Conservation
Non Technical Summary
Geoengineering, planetary-scale engineering in response to climate change, is increasingly part of the scientific and public debate. Scientists and politicians around the world are asking if deployment of large-scale technologies might be necessary to reduce the effects of global warming while carbon reduction strategies take effect. This project focuses on those geoengineering technologies that manipulate solar radiation, proposals to brighten clouds, enhance terrestrial albedo, engineer sulfate particles for the upper atmosphere, or deploy space mirrors. Because such proposals involve manipulation of Earth's climatic system at an unprecedented scale and may involve significant risk and uncertainty, they raise challenging ethical issues. Should humans take intentional control of the climate What level of risk of unintended consequences is acceptable Given the uneven nature of the winners and losers, would the potential benefits to any one group be allowed to trump the potential harms to another Does geoengineering distract attention from important mitigation tasks This project will contribute to deliberations over solar radiation management through an investigation of important questions concerning social and procedural justice, the role of technology in solving environmental problems, risk and uncertainty, and public trust in science. The project is interdisciplinary, combining philosophical and social science research, guided by an advisory panel of geoengineers, climate scientists, and policy experts. Interviews with a diversity of stakeholders from around the world, including marginalized and vulnerable populations will be integrated with ethical research to produce an analysis of the moral issues that the global community needs to address prior to any decision to move forward with geoengineering. Ethics, biophysical science, and social science will be interwoven in a variety of products (a book, scholarly articles, and an interactive web resource) that engage multiple audiences in a dialogue about the very real ethical concerns raised by the possibility of the unprecedented step of intentionally engineering the climate.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to make significant and lasting contributions to contemporary deliberations over the ethics of SRM. We will fulfill this goal by: Conducting in-depth, interdisciplinary research aimed at identifying, examining, and explaining the ethical questions geoengineering raises and discussing possible answers to these questions. This research will lead to a book and three scholarly articles aimed at interdisciplinary audiences. Engaging graduate students, researchers, policy experts, NGOs, and the public in a dialogue about the ethics of geoengineering, pursuing this objective through: A major workshop at the University of Montana, including top scientists, graduate students, policy-makers, legal scholars, ethicists, and the public. An interactive on-line resource center containing information on the most viable projects in geoengineering and the relevant ethical issues. Investigating the question of how people from a diversity of regions around the world consider the ethical issues raised by geoengineering: Social science research that includes in-depth interviews with a diversity of stakeholders in both politically powerful regions (the U.S. and Europe) and vulnerable and marginalized regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, low-lying Pacific Islands, and Arctic indigenous communities) about equity, risk, and vulnerability and about how a decision-making process might be crafted that is fair and just.
Project Methods
We will convene a 3-day workshop at The University of Montana to stimulate in-depth discussion on the ethics of SRM to frame and guide our research. We will invite leading scientists and scholars to discuss the specific SRM technologies. We also recruit 6 highly qualified graduate students. Workshop participants will work together to identify and prioritize the key ethical issues related to SRM management, and provide feedback on the proposed research design. The social science component of this project seeks to understand the concerns and views by interviewing scientist, policy-makers, community activists, and the staff of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on climate change in different regions of the world. We will interview 48 individuals evenly distributed amongst the following groups: (1) geo-engineers, and residents of (2) arctic indigenous communities in Alaska and Northern Canada, (3) sub-Saharan Africa, (4) low-lying Pacific Islands, (5) Western Europe, and (6) Southwestern U.S. We have selected these regions for the following reasons: 1) to ensure that the voices and views of people who are vulnerable to climate change and politically and economically marginalized, 2) to be able to compare and contrast the perspectives of marginalized people with the views of scientists, NGO staff, and policy-makers from Western Europe and the U.S, and 3) to understand both a diversity of views and gain some depth in particular regions of the world. We will utilize in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews guided by an interview guide to ensure comparability and consistency across the interview sample. Interview participants will be asked to specifically consider the various ethical dilemmas raised by geoengineering proposals and politics. The researchers will utilize frequent probes to understand how research participants are thinking about trade-offs, equity, risk and vulnerability, technology, and democratic decision-making. The interview format also provides opportunities for research participants to raise issues that were not anticipated by the research team, thus uncovering unexpected, unpredicted phenomena. The interview sampling will be purposive, with individuals selected for participation based on specific criteria. The goal of sampling will be to understand a diversity of views with depth in particular regions of the world. To achieve diversity in the sample, we will include women and men, and people from different ethnic groups, political perspectives, and generations. We will also seek out people with diverse views on technology and geoengineering in particular. The interview guide will be pretested with at least five individuals from different parts of the world. An initial list of potential participants will be generated using chain referral techniques. Interviews will be taped and transcribed verbatim. Individual interviews will be analyzed using a system of open coding followed by detailed across interview analysis and comparison. Interviews will not be anonymous, to obtain frank responses on these issues and that the context within which these individuals emerge is important for understanding their views.