Session 4: A Comparative View on Climate Engineering Options and Assessment Metrics

Chairs: Prof. Dr. Hermann Held (University of Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Jon Egill Kristjansson (University of Oslo)

This session should serve a two-fold purpose. Firstly, it should update existing knowledge about assessments of climate engineering options from various perspectives (in technical terms: along various ‘metrics’). Such an assessment would comprise a joint view on effectiveness as well as potential side-effects. Examples for well-established metrics are: global mean temperature reduction, cost, persistence and ubiquity of potential side-effects, reversibility, and more specifically, patterns of regional precipitation change.

Secondly this session strives at analyzing existing catalogues of such assessment metrics: what normative principles would individual metrics interfere with? For what stakeholders might they be relevant? Are ‘important’ metrics missing?
While the first topic of this session is well-established, the second has not witnessed a comparably systematic investigation yet.

Hence we invite contributions that would propose (not necessarily complete or new) sets of metrics to evaluate climate engineering options and highlight why each of those metrics might be relevant for society. The latter could be the case because those metrics would be informative regarding norms deduced from moral philosophy, or regarding values that have been articulated by ‘important’ stakeholders. If possible, the salience of metrics should be demonstrated for one or several climate engineering options as well as arguments for a possible ranking of the relevance of those metrics.
We also invite contributions on how to design a future co-definition of metrics by society at large and academia.