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As the latest contribution from UNESCO, the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology’s endeavour to study climate engineering technologies is timely as the research, development and possible deployment of these technologies could become life-changing issues for the present and future generations, both in a positive and negative way.

Current projections indicate that the world is headed towards a 1.5°C rise in temperature by 2030. If this is not fixed during this critical decade, the Paris Agreement goals will soon be beyond reach and the planet is likely to see global temperatures rise by 2-4 °C (3-7 °F) by the end of the century. The increasing pace at which the impacts of global warming are being felt around the world has brought new incentives to wider the scope of climate actions and consider less traditional techniques to counter the devastating effects of such environmental change. These techniques include the removal of greenhouse gases and the reduction of the heating effects of these gases, generally known to be a form of climate engineering or geoengineering.

The consideration of such methods, however, raises a host of ethical concerns and questions, which have already begun to attract some attention from the international scientific community. For instance, the report of the IPPC, released in February 2022, pays particular attention to the risks that arise from climate engineering, such as carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation modification techniques. Nevertheless, formal discussions on geoengineering, particularly with regard to the ethical considerations involved, remain rather latent and preliminary.