Could Solar Geoengineering Trigger War?

Alongside drought, famine, and climatic destabilization, you can add war to the list of potential (un)intended consequences of geoengineering, the Washington Post reports. As fossil-fueled climate changes continue to exacerbate drought, extreme heatwaves, and other disasters, so grows the incentive for governments to use geoengineering to block the sun or change rainfall patterns, despite the inevitable impacts outside their borders.

Solar geoengineering “may end up concentrating power in rich countries or nonstate actors in the global north,” Ajay K. Sood, the principal scientific adviser to the Indian government, said at a conference earlier this month. Malik Amin Aslam, a former Pakistani minister for climate change, also pointed out that even small-scale tests, “in troubled neighborhoods like ours” would need to be closely and collectively monitored; “an impossibility in the highly fractured and polarized environments like the one that exists between Pakistan and India.”

If and when there are negative outcomes of solar geoengineering, Mohammed Abu Syed, a senior fellow at the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, told The Post, “We would be the one who would most suffer from this.”

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The Washington Post

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