The UN’s top environmental agency chief has warned that a rush into experimental techniques to cool the atmosphere by partially blocking the sun risked harming wildlife, oceans, the ozone layer and crops, after a failure by governments to agree on how to control geoengineering.
“To look at it purely as a risk-risk within climate, what happens if we do not decarbonise versus what happens if we deploy [climate engineering] . . . is a false narrative for the whole of the global environment,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, told the Financial Times.
Nations failed to back a proposal by Switzerland and Monaco for a scientific research group to examine technology to block the sun’s rays, at a UN assembly in Nairobi last week.