In my open access article ‘Considering Stratospheric Aerosol Injections beyond an Environmental Frame: the ‘Emergency’ techno-fix and Preemptive Security’, I focus on a form of solar geoengineering known as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) which is attracting increasing attention as a potential technological response to the growing problems associated with climate change. SAI involves shooting reflective particles into the stratosphere to reflect some incoming solar radiation away from earth (often colloquially referred to as ‘dimming the sun’) in order to quickly cool global temperatures and address the most immediate and urgent effects of climate change.

Alongside tightening emissions reductions targets, programmes to increase energy efficiency and pledges by wealthy countries to provide money for clean development assistance and help with responding to  already serious climate impacts, there is growing interest in what is called geoengineering. There are many different potential forms of geoengineering that generally fall under two umbrellas: carbon geoengineering which is focused on different efforts to draw carbon and other greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere and solar geoengineering, which is focused on partially minimizing or reflecting back more incoming solar radiation away from the earth to reduce global temperatures. Carbon geoengineering will be of increasing importance in responses to climate change, and its various forms are often controversial in their own right, but it is generally a more long term intervention, the effects of which would be felt more slowly, and presents less of a need for urgent political attention than SAI.

The proof of concept for SAI is large volcanic eruptions which can cool global temperatures for around a year to 18 months as the particles they deposit in the stratosphere circulate and minimize incoming solar radiation. Scientists have been working to model if and how to deploy SAI and what its potential side effects might be, but due to the complexities of the earth system it is difficult to know what all the effects might be before deployment at scale.

In any case, there is apparently widespread agreement that effective governance structures for solar geoengineering will be critically important because it is a planetary level intervention whose impacts are inescapably global although they may manifest differently in different regions. There is surprisingly little work on solar geoengineering in International Relations and security, though Olaf Corry and others have pointed out that if governing climate change emissions has proven so difficult there is little reason to assume that governing efforts to partially block out the sun will prove easier. My article seeks to draw more attention to SAI within IR and security studies because it is gaining momentum as a potential climate intervention without full consideration of its potential international political and security implications.

My article pushes back against the widespread assumption that the development and deployment of SAI will be driven exclusively or primarily by environmental and climatological concerns. Much of discussion around SAI right now focuses on its humanitarian potential and assumes that those with the most interest in the technology, and most likely to deploy it, are those that are more vulnerable to climate change. Part of this is tied to the oft-repeated notion that SAI is a relatively cheap and fast way to cool global temperatures. While it is less expensive than rapid draw down of emissions by an order of magnitude and it would not require a huge amount of money or infrastructure to make an initial foray into SAI, to maintain a programme at scale would actually require significant infrastructure in the form of fleets of aircraft deployed from the right places, at the right times on a continuous schedule that can be closely monitored and adjusted. The article further explores some of the potential political challenges and risks associated with large scale deployment of SAI and argues that the political and security complexities of SAI development and deployment are likely to be more significant than has been fully appreciated because of the stakes of getting it wrong and the resources that it would demand over time.

Despite the fact that the US is the centre of research, investment and interest in SAI, there has been very little analysis of it as an actor likely to deploy SAI because it is relatively insulated from the impacts of climate change so far. However, SAI fits well within pre-emptive security frameworks that have characterized US security policy even before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and that have intensified over time. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, SAI has the potential to make climate change more intelligible as a political and security problem because it fits into a problem-response/solution framework.

Although climate change is taken seriously by most state and security actors it is often assessed as a ‘threat multiplier’ that makes existing problems worse and it has, as mentioned above, proven difficult to develop effective international and domestic responses to the problem. There is longstanding policy analysis work that suggests that even if a problem is very serious, it is difficult for it to be placed onto a political agenda if there is not a clear solution available. This is not at all to suggest that SAI is a solution to climate change. Not least due to concerns about what is known as ‘mitigation deterrence’ in which actors may feel less urgency to address bringing down emissions because the heat has literally been turned down SAI is not a solution but more a dangerous temporary sunscreen. However, as the article examines, the efficacy of a response is sometimes less important than its intelligibility. Whether it is safe, addresses the underlying problem, or does more harm than good politically or environmentally may be less immediately important within security and political frameworks.

SAI raises a number of security and political issues that deserve much greater attention within IR. This article hopes to raise the profile of SAI as a security/political challenge closely connected to how we are thinking through the problems raised by climate change and environmental breakdown moving forward. How to respond to the problems created by climate change is a matter of serious international political contestation. Many of the actors that have contributed the most to the problem over time are also the most insulated from its worst effects and it has been exceedingly difficult to bring political will to bear on the problem, which requires extensive, sustained international cooperation to effectively address. As the various consequences of climate change become clearer, the pressure to deliver an effective political response is also intensifying, which may open the door for premature or poorly governed solar geoengineering.

– Danielle N. Young, University of Leeds

– Young’s article is published as open access in the European Journal of International Security and is therefore free to read