Large-Scale Intentional Intervention s into the Climate System? Assessing the Climate Engineering Debate

German Scoping Survey on CE in now available in English. The Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) has an interdisciplinary team of scientists commissioned, to assamble the current state of knowledge on climate engineering. As a result is given, along with six special studies of the natural sciences, law, economics, politics, social sciences and ethics, an integrative overall report as a joint effort of all authors. The Kiel Earth Institute as an involved institution has coordinated scientists and serves as editor of the findings.

"Climate engineering – a collective term for large-scale technical interventions in the Earth‘s climate system – is increasingly discussed as an option to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Climate engineering technologies cover technologies both for the causative reduction of and the symptomatic compensation for anthropogenic climate change. The former are called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies because they reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, the latter radiation management (RM) technologies because they directly influence radiation balance and therefore temperature. As the definition implies, any application of climate engineering has potentially global effects: climate and ecosystems would be changed across the world, affecting the environments of whole societies. For this reason, a purely scientific or economic analysis of the topic falls extremely short, precisely because climate engineering affects so many environmental media, societies and areas of human life.

The scoping report “Large-scale intentional interventions into the climate system: Assessing the climate engineering debate” has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team of experts from six disciplines on behalf of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The Kiel Earth Institute has coordinated this project."