The World Science Summit on Climate Engineering: Future Guiding Principles and Ethics Date: 2-3 December 2014 Venue: U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue, Washington DC
Background: The inability of the global community to effectively limit or roll back greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continues to undermine the ability to minimize impacts of global climate change and has led to serious speculation about the need for engineering the climate. Climate engineering, just to mitigate against the temperature increases predicted by the mid to late part of the current century, opens our planet to many potentially hazardous and dangerous unknowns. In order to manage the risks and limit "larger scale" experiments with trans-boundary implications, we need to establish new and innovative perspectives on the development of global principles and ethics pertaining to climate engineering. Strong pleas are growing for governments to develop governance structures to oversee the emerging R&D activities involving climate modification at scale by individual scientists or countries. Objectives of the Summit: We will engage the global scientific community, including world class men and women scientists, to bring new and innovative perspectives to the development of global principles and ethics - encompassing the potential social, ecological, and economic effects on climate engineering. This forum is viewed as an important follow-on of the "Geoengineering the Climate" report of the Royal Society, the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies, and subsequent discussions of governance structures for engineering the climate. Expected Impact of the Summit: From your Summit participation and involvement, we will take the next critical step of defining what is and is not acceptable for scientists to pursue as members of the scientific community. We will create a set of guiding principles for climate engineering research. We will circulate these principles to the broad scientific community, for endorsement by their professional societies and associations. We aim to include the broadest cross-section of the scientific community to define the scope and scale of climate engineering research that can be reasonably pursued and why. We will identify the research that falls outside those boundaries, requiring world scale formal governance structures, strictures, and instruments to implement. Participation in the Summit: You may register at http://www.cssp.us/ (click on "Meetings" menu at the top of the page.) Please note that registration is limited. If you have any questions, please contact the CSSP office ([email protected]) or Paul Bertsch ([email protected]) of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.
