Technologies of Common Concern
Wednesday 31st October, 16:30 - 18:00. 538, Royal College Building, University of Strathclyde
This event is free but please register at Eventbrite.
Description
Solar geoengineering as a potential response to climate change is receiving increasing scientific and policy attention. Solar geoengineering technologies propose to cool the Earth¹s temperature by reducing the amount of radiative energy absorbed by the Earth through methods that scatter or reflect sunlight back to space.
The conduct of solar geoengineering research is highly controversial due to the potentially severe and unevenly distributed environmental risks associated with solar geoengineering technologies as they scale-up. In addition, there are social and ethical concerns associated with solar geoengineering, such as the potential moral hazard it presents and the long term governability of a technology that seeks to influence climatic conditions on a global scale, that are largely decoupled from the physical impacts of research activities.
Because of these concerns, there is high demand for international governance of solar geoengineering research, but the physical characteristics of small scale research are unlikely to attract existing international legal rules since at early stages the physical risks of research are not likely to be transboundary nor will they exceed the threshold of a likelihood of significant harm.
The international regulation of solar geoengineering is further complicated by the uncertain legal status of activities occurring in the atmosphere.
One potential legal avenue is the concept of common concern of humankind, a class of international legal problems (e.g. climate change, biodiversity and ozone depletion) that raise global concern, but defy traditional understandings of transboundary harm. The legal content common concern has recently been questioned (by the ILC, in connection with atmospheric protection), and, to date, has not been applied to a technology, but solar geoengineering raises a set of concerns that might best be governed with reference to this concept.
This paper explores the legal possibilities and implications of identifying technologies of common concern, using solar geoengineering, as an example.
Neil Craik
A. Neil Craik is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo with appointments to the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, where he teaches and researches in the fields of international and Canadian environmental law. His current research examines the legal structure of global commons regimes. Professor Craik has particular interests in climate and geoengineering law and governance, deep seabed mining regulation and environmental impact assessment.
