What geoengineering governance means

Governance here means the rules determining who may research, test or deploy climate intervention, under what conditions, with what accountability. It matters disproportionately because of the two properties established in Part 5: solar radiation modification is fast and cheap. A technology requiring a trillion dollars and thirty years governs itself through its own difficulty. One that a single state could attempt within a decade does not.

Where the governance stands

Established There is no binding international framework governing solar geoengineering research, outdoor experimentation or deployment. That was the explicit position of the US Environmental Protection Agency as of July 2025 and remains the situation.

Established What exists is a patchwork. The Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a moratorium on geoengineering activities that may affect biodiversity in 2010, reaffirmed in 2024 — widely described as a de facto moratorium, though its legal force over research is disputed. The Scientific Groups of the London Convention and London Protocol issued a statement in 2023 recognising potential for deleterious effects from marine techniques. Parties to the Montreal Protocol are tracking relevant research. The International Court of Justice's 2025 advisory opinion, subsequently affirmed by a UN General Assembly resolution, held that states must prevent foreseeable harm, uphold precaution and regulate private actors — general principles that clearly bear on this and were not written for it.

Frontier Activity is outrunning the framework. The UK committed £56.8 million in 2025 through its advanced research agency to 21 projects, five involving outdoor experiments; critics argue this sits uneasily with the CBD moratorium, while the UK government states it does not favour deployment and has no plans for it. A commercial venture raised $75 million toward being deployment-ready within a decade, then backed away from outdoor experiments planned for spring 2026 after scrutiny. At least one company has already released reflective material into the atmosphere and sold credits against it.

Frontier The governance community is genuinely divided, and the division is substantive rather than tribal. A Non-Use Agreement campaign argues SRM is untestable, uncontrollable and ungovernable, and that research normalises deployment. Others, including scholars sympathetic to strong regulation, argue a global moratorium is the wrong instrument — that it would be unenforceable, would push work into less transparent settings, and should in any case be decided by a politically legitimate representative body rather than declared. Expert bodies have generally landed between: outdoor experimentation only where it yields information unobtainable by modelling, and no deployment at climate-altering scale.

Speculative Whether any framework could constrain a determined state is unresolved. Handwave Claims that geoengineering is already being conducted covertly at scale are not supported by evidence, and confusing them with the real and documented small-scale releases makes the actual governance gap harder to discuss.

The binding bottleneck

Frontier The constraint is the mismatch between deployment cost and governance cost: the intervention is cheap and the institution required to govern it is expensive, slow and would need near-universal participation. Frontier Second is the research paradox — governing research requires knowing its risks, which requires research. Frontier Third is legitimacy: no existing body has an obvious mandate, and the populations most affected have least representation in the institutions that might claim one. Established Fourth is attribution, since without it liability regimes have nothing to attach to.

Ethics and governance

Frontier Procedural justice is the core issue: who consents on behalf of populations that would experience regional effects. Frontier The moral hazard concern operates on governance too — building an apparatus to permit intervention may itself signal that intervention is expected. Frontier Against that, the absence of a framework does not produce inaction; it produces unregulated action, which is what the record since 2023 shows. Established The Institute takes no position on whether SRM should be researched or deployed, and notes that this is a live political dispute in which reasonable people disagree on the evidence rather than merely on values.

Timelines

  • 10 yr: Frontier national research-governance frameworks proliferate; international coordination remains soft law; disputes intensify.
  • 25 yr: Speculative a binding instrument becomes plausible, most likely reactive to an incident rather than anticipatory.
  • 50 yr: Speculative if deployment occurs, a standing international body to manage it; if not, the framework may never be built.
  • 100 / 250+ yr: Speculative planetary-scale environmental governance as a permanent institution, which is Category VIII territory.