AS families gather with friends to celebrate, we must count our blessings that Mother Earth has bestowed upon us, which we often take for granted.

Mother Earth’s health and well-being is vital for our continued survival and sustenance.

As we witness the alarming onset of climate change, warnings grow louder for speedier and more urgent action across the globe to limit temperature rise to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era.

There have been proliferating calls for manipulating the Earth with very risky solar geo-engineering technologies which are unknown to many, including governments.

The irresponsible idea behind such speculative technologies is that we can continue to plunder, overconsume and pollute our Earth and believe it is possible to engineer our way out of our problems.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Nigerian student Chukwumerije Okereke said one such solar engineering technology – solar radiation management – gathering the most attention is to use balloons or aircraft to spray large quantities of aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the sunlight.

As pointed out in the article, other proposed techniques include covering deserts with plastic; genetically engineering plants to have brighter, more reflective leaves; creating or making clouds whiter; and deploying millions of mirrors in space.

The point of all of them is to counter warming by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet and reflecting it back to the stratosphere.’

Instead of making investments in developing countries supporting renewable energy and other genuine climate solutions, attention is being diverted by funding geoengineering researchers, particularly those in the United States with support from Bill Gates and philanthropists from Silicon Valley, while George Soros has recently announced his intention to back solar geoengineering projects in the Arctic.

In fact, recently, US start-up Make Sunsets launched balloons from Mexico to inject sulphur into the atmosphere with the claim this would offset carbon emissions.

It seems that the Mexican government was unaware of the exercise until after the event, and officials swiftly announced a ban on solar geoengineering projects.

Developing country governments are being courted by irresponsible researchers and companies to become testing grounds for these technologies.

To counter this and to raise public attention, more than 400 senior climate scientists and scholars from around the world have called for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering, which hopefully results in a ban on real-world research for this technology.

There is in fact a moratorium under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity on the development and deployment of these technologies, and we in Malaysia too must be on the alert and work with other nations to prevent us from becoming testing grounds, with seductive promises of making money. 

We join the call of concerned scientists for immediate action from governments and the United Nations to prevent the normalisation of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option.

Governments and the UN must assert effective control and restrict the development of solar geoengineering technologies designed for use on a planetary scale.

The scientists’ fundamental concerns include the following:

The risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known. Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water.

Speculative hopes about the future availability of solar geoengineering technologies threaten commitments to mitigation and can disincentivise governments, businesses, and societies to do their utmost to achieve decarbonization or carbon neutrality as soon as possible.

The speculative possibility of future solar geoengineering risks becoming a powerful argument for industry lobbyists, climate denialists, and some governments to delay decarbonisation policies.

The current global governance system is unfit to develop and implement the far-reaching agreements needed to maintain fair, inclusive, and effective political control over solar geoengineering deployment.

In short, solar geoengineering deployment cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.

Specifically, we call for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering.

Sahabat Alam Malaysia echoes the call that our Earth should not be a climate laboratory. Selamat Hari Raya! – April 21, 2023.

* Meenakshi Raman is president of Sahabat Alam Malaysia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.