Speaker
Description
Greenhouse gas emissions continue to drive global warming, with severe and often irreversible impacts on ecosystems. Deep decarbonization remains essential to respect the Paris Agreement thresholds, but geoengineering concepts are gaining public attention as potential “quick fixes”.
We present our evaluattion of five of the most advertised geoengineering concepts for the polar regions, proposed as “solutions” to limit impacts of globally rising temperatures: stratospheric aerosol injection, sea-ice management, sea curtains, subglacial drying and ocean iron fertilization. We evaluate these five concepts based on six criteria: feasibility, unintended consequences, timing, scalability, governance, risk of false hopes. Our evaluation results were recently published in Frontiers in Science authored by 42 experts from polar and climate sciences. We find that none of the evaluated concepts are viable or responsible options to limit climate impacts in the coming decades. Pursuing research into these five concepts risks diverting focus and resources from urgent mitigation and adaptation priorities. Of particular relevance to this session, these geoengineering approaches all risk severe damage to environments and ecosystems at local, regional and hemispheric scales. The evaluation framework we established can also be used to examine future geoengineering concepts or be applied to other geographies.
Full author list provided in the published article www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2025.1527393/full.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | Yes |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
