IPCC To Assess Geoengineering

An assessment of geoengineering technologies will be a component of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The announcement came last week after an IPCC meeting of geoengineering experts who gathered to provide input for its next report, which is due out in 2013–14. The upcoming report will include scientific and technical assessments of proposed geoengineering techniques, their possible effects on ecosystems, and the impacts they may have on different parts of the world over short and long time frames, says Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science and cochair of the IPCC working group on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability to climate change. The assessment will include scholarship on ethics and international governance of geoengineering, he adds. Information in the report will be provided to assist policymakers in making climate-related decisions, but will not include recommendations, says Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and cochair of the IPCC working group on climate-change mitigation.