Summary/Abstract
Climate geoengineering is defined by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.”As a number of commentators have noted, climate geoengineering could prove to be the most imposing global governance challenge of the next few decades. This is primarily because it could create both winners and losers in terms of its impacts. While this paper agrees with commentators who have expressed the need for the establishment of a comprehensive international governance framework for climate geoengineering, fleshing out its contours is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, the purpose here is to suggest that a human rights-based approach may constitute a critical component in addressing intrinsic issues of equity and justice that would necessarily arise should the world community opt to proceed down this path. In developing this argument, this paper provides an overview of climate geoengineering options; discusses the potential human rights implications of climate geoengineering, including within the context of the Paris Agreement; and develops a human rights-based approach to operationalizing the human rights provisions of the Paris Agreement in the context of climate geoengineering options.