Occasional Papers

The Occasional Paper Series provides a vehicle for work written by InSIS staff, associate fellows, and friends of the institute on a diverse range of topics relevant to InSIS' key areas of focus.

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Important progress is being made in international climate talks and at the national and sub-national levels towards addressing the causes and consequences of climate change. Nonetheless, some scientists have suggested that more action may be required to curb rising temperatures in this century and have begun to discuss intentional large-scale interventions in the planetary environment as an additional response strategy. But even theoretical work on geoengineering can be controversial and field experiments have the potential to cause environmental harm. This has led to widespread calls for the development of governance and regulatory frameworks for geoengineering.

A new study by legal researchers at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Anna-Maria Hubert and David Reichwein, provides a comprehensive examination of a possible international code of conduct for geoengineering research. The IASS Working Paper entitled ‘An Exploration of a Code of Conduct for Responsible Scientific Research Involving Geoengineering’ is being released in collaboration between IASS and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society.
 

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In public discussion, scientific publications, political debate and economic analysis alike, climate engineering is always presented in a certain way which alleviates the importance of some aspects of it and neglects others – climate engineering is framed. Frames are considered very relevant for this issue in social science literature. The aim of this paper is to discover which representations of climate engineering (CE) are considered most salient, and how they are approached. The author argues that the understanding of climate engineering as (part of) a solution to the political problem of climate change is the dominant frame in the discourse on the issue. On the basis of this frame, other, more specific frames are analyzed in the literature.

About the Author

Judith Kreuter is a Research Fellow at the Chair of International Relations, Political Science Institute, Technical University Darmstadt, Germany.

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