Holistic Climate Justice: The guidelines recognize that geoengineering will impact not only the people currently living on Earth, but also future generations. Some methods, such as stratospheric aerosols, do not eliminate the risks caused by warming, but shift them to future generations, who will face sudden and potentially dramatic warming if geoengineering is ever stopped. Others may cause regional differences in benefits or warming, shifting impacts to different populations.
Special attention should be paid to those who have historically been on the wrong side of environmental problems in the past. And the damage to nature must also be taken into account.
Inclusive audience participation: The research should not be approached purely as a scientific process; instead, all affected communities should be involved in the process and informed consent should be obtained from them. There must be continued public engagement with these communities and adaptation to their cultural values.
Transparency: The public needs to know who is funding which geoengineering research and ensure that whoever provides the money does not influence decisions about how the research is designed. These decisions, and the considerations underlying them, must also be made clear to the public.
Informed management: All experiments must comply with laws ranging from local to international. Any research programs must be approved by an independent body before work begins. All parties involved – and this may include funders, institutions and external contractors – must be accountable to governments, public institutions and those potentially affected by the work.
If you think this will make conducting this study significantly more complicated, you are absolutely right. But again, even testing these approaches could have serious environmental consequences. And many of these things represent best practices for any investigation with potential public impact; the fact that they are not always pursued is no excuse to continue avoiding them.
