Designing Procedural Mechanisms for the Governance of Solar Radiation Management Field Experiments: Workshop Report

From February 23-24, 2015, a two-day workshop was held in Ottawa in order to consider specific governance tools that may be used in connection with SRM field research activities. The goal of the workshop was to provide a concrete set of process-oriented mechanism options for evaluation by a range of Canadian and US government officials who are likely to soon be faced with SRM field experiment proposals. The two procedural mechanisms that were the focus of the workshop were EIAs and research registries. A number of recently published SRM field experiment proposals were also presented to the workshop participants to guide and support their evaluation of the potential governance mechanisms. The workshop attendees (17 in total), included scientific experts with interests in conducting SRM field experiments and government officials drawn from environmental regulation, research funding and science policy areas, as well as social scientists with expertise in climate engineering governance.