This workshop focuses on geoengineering strategies which attempt to manage the amount of solar energy reaching the earth, particularly by dispersing particles into the stratosphere. Solar- shading proposals, some of which could be implemented fairly quickly and with relatively few resources, exemplify both the promise and the problem of geoengineering. By their very nature, such strategies are intended to have dramatic global effects, and therefore can only be understood in light of an immensely complicated scientific, political, regulatory and ethical environment which must be considered from multiple perspectives at once.
To achieve the necessary breadth, participants of this workshop will not only include climate scientists, ethicists, and international lawyers, but defense experts, environmental psychologists, mitigation and adaptation experts, sociologists, historians, political scientists, agricultural biologists and others. It aims to attract a diverse group which can think through the complex interplay of forces affecting the future and outline plausible and detailed possibilities for worlds in which geoengineering has been attempted or avoided from a wide variety of fields.
This workshop is organized by the Yale Climate & Energy Institute, co-sponsored by The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and will be held in New Haven, Connecticut.