Sky Wars: Escalation Pathways in the Age of Solar Geoengineering - Preprint

[Geoengineering News]

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5434715

Authors: Gideon Futerman, Peter Rautenbach

03 September 2025

Abstract

As the salience of Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) - also known as Solar Geoengineering - rises, there have been increasing discussions of the possible security and conflict implications of these technologies. This piece looks at SRM through the lens of securitization and how SRM can securitize climate change and related disasters. Critically, SRM can enable climate disasters to be attributed to SRM-deploying actors. By creating a "threatening Other" on which to blame climate change, securitisation and exceptional measures, such as conflict, can be pursued in response to climatic events. Using past work, this piece builds a typology of conflict pathways and explores how the causal mechanisms illuminated by securitisation help explain conflict risk in these scenarios. Finally, with conflict-inducing-securitization in mind, we add a new, unexplored, conflict risk which outlines how conflict could occur in response to counter-geoengineering-a response to SRM which has been seen as an offramp for conflict risk.

Source: SSRN