Playing god with climate :The EU’s geoengineering conundrum

Despite accelerating energy transition efforts, the world is well on track to overshoot the warming targets of the Paris Agreement. This could potentially lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts. Geoengineering is increasingly floated as one of the solutions that could forestall the worst consequences of global warming. While in recent years carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies have gone mainstream by gaining political and financial support, solar radiation management (SRM) approaches such as stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, and cirrus cloud thinning remain highly controversial. To prevent rogue SRM deployment and evaluate the potential of this technology as a climate fix of last resort, the EU needs to establish a code of practice for solar geoengineering experiments, support solar geoengineering research, and initiate international talks on solar radiation management governance.