For now, a heavy reliance on SAI seems an imprudent policy response.Ĭould the risks of large-scale solar geoengineering be worse than the dangers posed by climate change? Many concerns have been expressed over geoengineering the Earth's climate. We cannot equivocally determine whether SAI will be worse than warming. Conversely, larger use of SAI used in an uncoordinated manner poses many potential dangers. A well-coordinated use of a small amount of SAI would incur negligible risks, but this is an optimistic scenario. Across all these dimensions, the specific SAI deployment, and associated governance, is critical. Sufficiently large global shocks could force SAI termination and trigger SAI's latent risk, compounding disasters and catastrophic risks. That is, if SAI were removed but underlying greenhouse gas concentrations not reduced, there would be extreme warming in a very short timeframe. Thicker SAI masking extreme warming could create a planetary Sword of Damocles. This creates a precarious condition of latent risk, the largest cause for concern. SAI deployment more tightly couples different ecological, economic, and political systems. SAI's systemic stressors, and risks of systemic cascades and synchronous failures, are highly understudied. SAI could contribute to systemic risk by introducing stressors into critical systems such as agriculture. SAI plausibly interacts with other catastrophic calamities, most notably by potentially exacerbating the impacts of nuclear war or an extreme space weather event. The potential for major unforeseen environmental consequences seems highly unlikely but is ultimately unknown. Acting as a latent risk (risk that is dormant but can later be triggered). Exacerbating systemic risk (risks that cascade and amplify across different systems) Ĥ. Interacting with other globally catastrophic hazards like nuclear war.ģ. Acting as a direct catastrophic risk through potentially unforeseen ecological blowback.Ģ. We split SAI's contributions to catastrophic risk into four interrelated dimensions:ġ. This paper helps resolve this gap by investigating SAI's contributions to global catastrophic risk. But analyses of such high impact outcomes are lacking in SAI research. But could the cure be worse than the disease? Understanding low probability, yet plausible, high-impact cases is critical to prudent climate risk management and SAI deliberation. Injecting particles into atmosphere to reflect sunlight, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), represents a potential technological solution to the threat of climate change. 2Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, The University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.1Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
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