“Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus,” stated Silvia Ribeiro, Latin American Director of ETC Group.

The agreement was reached at the 10 Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which came to an end on October 29th in Nagoya, Japan. The CBD secretariat was also instructed to report back on various geoengineering proposals and potential intergovernmental regulatory measures. Solar radiation management through the liberation of stratospheric aerosols and cloud whitening, and ocean fertilization, are some of the geoengineering techniques proposed by several industrialized countries to “combat” climate change.

Ocean fertilization was banned in 2008, which stopped a series of dangerous public and private experiments to capture CO2 by pouring nutrients into the ocean. This ban allowed the larger moratorium to be implemented.

The ETC group works on global socio-economic and environmental issues, related to new technologies, and especially to the impacts of these on indigenous peoples, rural communities and biodiversity. According to a press release by the ETC Group, Executive Director Pat Mooney said “This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs”. “Decisions on geoengineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving ‘voluntary guidelines’ on climate hacking. What little credibility such efforts may have had in some policy circles in the global North has been shattered by this decision”, he added.

The activist also said that “This decision is a victory for common sense, and for precaution.” And that is why “The UK Royal Society and its partners should cancel their Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, and respect that the world’s governments have collectively decided that future deliberations on geoengineering should take place in the UN, where all countries have a seat at the table and where civil society can watch and influence what they are doing”, he added.

The ETC Group issued on October 19th a report called “Geopiracy: The Case against Geoengineering” and called the governments to support a moratorium on geoengineering.

The organization argues that geoengineering experiments, due to their scale, are beyond the parameters of real-world scientific testing and beyond the scope of current international law. These experiments are serious threats to biodiversity, they add. “Extreme Risk Demands Extreme Precaution”, stated several civil society organizations which also support the moratorium.

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