Governing geoengineering research: why, when and how?

While justified as necessary in order to expand the range of options available to policy makers in the future, geoengineering research has already engendered public controversy. Proposed projects have been protested or cancelled, and calls for a governance framework abound.

In this paper, we consider the reasons why geoengineering research might be subject to additional governance and suggest mechanisms that might be usefully applied in developing such a framework. We consider criteria for governance as raised by a review of the growing literature on geoengineering and other controversial scientific topics. We suggest three families of concern that any governance research framework must respond to: the direct physical risks of the research; the transparency and responsibility in decision making for the research; and the larger societal meanings of the research.