Draft:International non-use agreement on solar geoengineering

The international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering is a proposal from academics to restrict the research, development, and potential use of solar radiation modification (SRM, also known as solar geoengineering), an approach to reduce climate change impacts.

Proposal

Initially launched as an academic article by sixteen scholars of political science and other social sciences, the proposal calls for:

• No public funding
• No outdoor experiments
• No patents
• No deployment
• No support in international institutions, including in assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The advocates’ core argument is that, because SRM would be global in effect and some countries are much more powerful than others, it is “not governable in a globally inclusive and just manner within the current international political system.” They therefore oppose the “normalization” of SRM and call on countries, intergovernmental organizations, and others to adopt the proposal’s five elements. The position of developing countries is central to the proposal, since they would be more vulnerable to any negative side effects of SRM yet presumably lack control over whether and how SRM would be used.

Political campaign

On the day that the academic article was published, the authors also launched a political campaign calling for others to endorse the proposal. Its open letter--shorter than the full academic article--emphasized, in addition to the governance challenges, that SRM’s risks are “poorly understood and can never be fully known” and that its potential would threaten commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As of March 2024, nearly 500 academics and 60 advocacy organizations have endorsed the proposal. Among the latter is Climate Action Network, itself a coalition of more than 1900 political organizations.

Publication controversy

The campaign’s foundational academic article was the subject of a controversy regarding conflicts of interest. Its central argument that SRM is ungovernable was first made by Mike Hulme in a 2014 book. The campaign initially went public in a 2021 letter to Nature, whose signatories were the sixteen authors of the ultimately published article plus Hulme.

Subsequently, the authors--now without Hulme--submitted the article to WIREs Climate Change, where Hulme was the editor-in-chief. He was also the managing editor of the article. One of the reviewers later publicly shared her dissatisfaction with the process.[1] On the day that the article was published, Hulme endorsed the political campaign.

It is generally considered inappropriate, including at Wiley, the publisher, for an article’s managing editor to have an interest in its outcome. A letter of concern was sent to Wiley, which investigated. A note was subsequently appended to the academic article, concluding among other things that “best practice would have been for Professor Hulme to recuse himself from the peer review process due to his involvement as an author in a previous version… Professor Hulme's author contribution to the earlier version of the article represents a conflict of interest.” Although Wiley decided against any further action, Hulme resigned as editor-in-chief near the end of the investigation.