COVID-19 and Geoengineering

As the detrimental effects of climate change become more apparent, it's likely you'll hear more talk about geoengineering – modifying the Earth on a global scale to mitigate the effects for climate change. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is showing us that we have to look at more than just the technology when considering global scale projects. 

This article describes five key things that we can learn from our response to the pandemic. 

So what lessons might the COVID-19 crisis offer for ‘solar geoengineering’ – the idea that interventions able to reduce a fraction of incoming sunlight to the planet might be developed to mask rising temperatures? Colleagues and I explored five such lessons in a recent commentary (although here I speak only for myself).

First a caveat: COVID-19 and climate are very different challenges, although both are global crises born of exploitation of nonhuman nature. Global warming is more long term and an entire Earth system out of kilter will be harder to govern than a rogue virus. But emergency responses to both global threats will have to navigate some of the same kinds of uncertainty and the same emerging science-media environment. ‘Pandemic politics’ may have provided a useful glimpse of what solar geoengineering has in store.