Summary/Abstract
This article reports on the findings of a scenarios method designed to interrogate how far ‘climate engineering’ ideas may develop in the future and under what governance arrangements. The inform the article, the authors convened a one-day event with experts in climate change and climate engineering from across the sectors of government, industry, civil society and academia in the UK, with additional experts from Brazil, Germany and India. The participants were invited to develop scenarios for four climate engineering ideas: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture and storage, stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening. Manifold challenges for future research were identified, placing the scenarios in sharp contrast with early portrayals of climate engineering research as threatening a ‘slippery slope’ of possible entrenchments, lock-ins and path dependencies that would inexorably lead to deployment. The resultant article suggests that the governance challenges for climate engineering should therefore today be thought of as less of a slippery slope than an ‘uphill struggle’ and that there is an increasingly apparent need for governance that responsibly incentivizes, rather than constrains, research. The article finds that affecting market processes by introducing an effective global carbon price and direct government expenditure on research and development are incentives with broad potential applications to climate engineering. Responsibly incentivizing research will involve a pluralistic architecture of governance arrangements and policy instruments that attends to collective ambitions as well as national differences and emerges from an inclusive and reflexive process.