Geoengineering and Public Policy

This chapter explores the concept of geoengineering in the context of public policy. It provides an overview of debates and controversies around the use of the term, the governance considerations linked to geoengineering research and experimentation, as well as the imaginaries and concerns associated with potential geoengineering deployment. The author introduces a heuristic that groups geoengineering techniques according to the amount of actors potentially needed to deliberately change the climate using different techniques. The heuristic distinguishes between centralized, industrial, and emergent forms of geoengineering. The degree of concentration in implementation power is then associated with different implications for public policy.