BONN, 11 June — At the UN climate negotiations SB64, civil society organizations, grassroots movements, and climate justice advocates from across Africa, Asia, and Latin America came together today to strongly reject geoengineering as a false solution and dangerous distraction from real climate action.
Speakers from across the Global South warned that geoengineering, which is the large-scale technological interventions designed to manipulate the Earth’s systems, is being advanced despite its profound ecological, social, and geopolitical risks. Rather than addressing the root causes of the climate crisis, these approaches enable business to continue as usual.
At the same time, geoengineering is being advanced through climate policy spaces, particularly through the Paris Agreement’s Article 6 which gives entry to carbon markets. Kwami Kpondzo, Global Forest Coalition said, “Africa must not be taken in or drawn into a new cycle of colonialism disguised in this wave of carbon markets and carbon credits. Polluters are promoting geoengineering technologies to maintain carbon market schemes which continue to worsen the climate crisis.”
The African continent has strongly opposed geoengineering technologies, especially solar geoengineering. This was evident at the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) meeting last year where governments expressed that “such technologies must not be considered as viable options within the multilateral environmental agenda” and called for “the establishment of a Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement” which would ban any efforts to normalise these technologies. Kpondzo added, “We welcome African leadership in advancing efforts on an international solar non use agreement.”
Gina Cortes Valderrama, Women and Gender Constituency of UNFCCC added, “The Women and Gender Constituency also calls on the UNFCCC and all UN bodies to recognize solar geoengineering as a category of technology that poses unprecedented risks, that is advancing without consent or justice frameworks, and that functions as a deliberate deferral of the structural transformation we need. We support the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement.”
Climate justice campaigners also pointed to the colonial dimensions of geoengineering, and intersections between extractivism and the current destructive development model, noting how they reproduce historical patterns of exploitation, turning lands, waters, and skies in the Global South into sites for experimentation and testing.
While sharing perspectives from Asia and the Pacific regions, Kaveri Choudhury, ETC Group said, “We are deeply concerned by the push for geoengineering proposals in the Asia-Pacific region at a time when climate solutions need real solutions more than ever. Geoengineering is a false climate solution that threatens the very integrity of life on earth. We need to urgently focus on protecting ecosystems for their intrinsic value and centered on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and peasants who are the guardians of these ecosystems.”
Gina Cortes Valderrama, Women and Gender Constituency added, “Geoengineering is a political choice that sends the message to the people that it is preferable to risk unprecedented harm to planetary systems than to confront the fossil fuel economy and the corporate power that sustains it. We are not here to ask how to govern a technology that should not exist. We are here to support the real solutions already being built by frontline communities.”
“Indigenous Peoples and local communities have the solution for global warming. These include the use of traditional knowledge through agroecology and community forest conservation,” added Kpondzo.
The press conference concluded with a strong call for South-South solidarity, as movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America continue to build collective resistance to geoengineering.
Additional Information
- Press Conference Livestream
- Policy decision: African Environmental Ministers Call for Establishment of Solar Non Use Agreement
- Policy Brief: Don’t Geoengineer Africa
- Press Release: African Climate Justice Movements Celebrate African Leadership in Rejecting Solar Geoengineering
- Opinion: Africa Is Not a Solar Geoengineering Test Site
- Geoengineering Projects Tracker
