Scientists call for rules on ‘solar engineering’

Drones, lasers track forest

LONDON, Oct 2, (RTRS): Technologies to reflect some of the sun’s rays away from Earth, as a way to cool future runaway climate change, are moving closer to becoming a reality, and rules are needed now to govern them, scientists and other experts said on Monday.

“There is no risk-free path at this point” in dealing with climate change, said David Morrow, research director for the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at the Washington-based American University.

Around the globe, research is pushing forward on potential cooling techniques such as spraying particles into the upper atmosphere to mimic volcanic eruptions or artificially brightening sea clouds, experts said in a report.

Such sun-dimming technology is designed to reduce the risks associated with accelerating warming in coming decades, from fiercer storms to harsher heatwaves.

But the report by a group of international climate and governance experts warned the technology could create new risks – “including climatic, environmental, social, geopolitical and ethical risks”.

For example, it might dissuade countries from curbing their climate-changing emissions, in the hope a technological fix is on the way.

Or a single nation might deploy the technologies in its own interests, without international rules in place, in an effort to quell a political outcry at home or shift scarce rainfall to drought-hit farmers, the experts said.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” warned Andy Parker, who runs a governance initiative on solar engineering technologies backed by Britain’s Royal Society, the World Academy of Sciences and the Environmental Defense Fund.

The report aims to guide research and policy on “solar radiation management” (SRM) through 2025 with a set of principles.

Morrow

Efforts

It recommends that efforts to curb climate change and adapt to its impacts must remain the top priority, ahead of technological fixes.

The report also calls for the risks and benefits of SRM to be “thoroughly and transparently” evaluated, and for research to focus on the social needs of the world’s poor.

It says “robust” governance, including a mechanism to resolve conflicts, must be in place before any deployment of the technologies is considered.

“The starting point was that research is happening and we need to talk about it,” said Aarti Gupta, an expert on governance of technological risk at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and one of the report authors. The 14-member panel that developed the principles included academic experts in fields such as policy and governance, social sciences, international relations and conflict resolution.

The group “fundamentally disagreed” on whether research on the technologies should even be allowed to go ahead but accepted the need to discuss them publicly, said Simon Nicholson, co-head of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment.

The paper comes ahead of the release of a report on Oct 8 by the world’s leading climate scientists, who will say the world is not on track to meet its emissionscutting goals.

If global warming continues at the same pace, it will exceed 1.5ºC – the most ambitious goal set in the Paris Agreement – by 2040, the report is expected to say, threatening everything from world food supplies to economic growth.

Growing fears of an “overshoot” of climate targets are one reason research is expanding on efforts to dim the sun and suck carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.

Such research, once confined to laboratories, “is beginning to move outdoors”, the report noted.

“Whether or not this (technology) is part of our toolbox .... the debate has to be had” on whether it should play a role, said Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative.

The report recommends that a code of conduct should be created governing research on the technologies, and that researchers make public the sources of their funding.

C. Rica tracks forest with drones:

Costa Rica has long monitored its forests and the carbon they hold but it hopes to soon have a cheaper and more effective way to do it: by drone.

Deep Forest, a project backed by environmental group Fundecor, semi-conductor manufacturer Intel and San Jose-based Aerial Robotixs, aims to give scientists a better idea of what is happening in the country’s forest canopy, and allow more frequent monitoring.

“There are many ways of taking these metrics but none with this level of resolution,” said Felipe Carazo, the executive director of Fundecor, a non-governmental organization that works on sustainable forest management.

“Here the advantage is the precision in a scheme that is cost-effective,” Carazo said at a Congress of Sustainability, Ecology and Evolution in San Jose.

The project will use a drone to fly over remote areas of forest, using a built-in laser to “scan” the forest.

The effort, still in an experimental phase, will scan three forests near the Costa Rican city of Guapiles this year, said its backers, who are financially supporting the test.

They say the method could scale up to help many countries monitor their forests more accurately – a step both towards reducing emissions from forest loss and tapping into the market for carbon credits from forest protection.

“It could help the region to fulfill the commitments we signed in the Paris Agreement,” said Timothy Scott, Intel’s governmental affairs manager.

The project is not the first to use advanced technology to monitor Costa Rica’s forests. The Iraz project, a forest satellite monitoring system, also will track forests using a satellite launched in April.

Around the world, drones are being used increasingly to gauge the health of forests, monitor illegal deforestation, and even replant forests from the air.

For Ruperto Quesada, a researcher at the Center for Research in Forest Innovation at the Technological Institute of Costa Rica (TEC), the technologies simply reinforce monitoring of forests that has gone on for more than 30 years in Costa Rica.