Changing the Climate or Changing Our Way of Life?

On the 10th of September, Dr Leonie Bossert started the Vienna Animal Studies (VAS) 2025 Winter Lecture Series by asking whether geoengineering has the potential to help animals or if it just presents another “techno-fix” informed by ideas of human domination.

Dr Leonie Bossert starts the Vienna Animal Studies Winter Lecture Series with a talk on geoengineering (Photo credit: Chloé Bolton).

Geoengineering, also known as climate engineering, entails deliberate large-scale technological interventions into Earth systems to counteract the negative impacts of human-caused climate change. Solar Radiation Management (SRM), for example, proposes to cool the Earth by reflecting a small portion of the sun's incoming energy back into space, whereas Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) hopes to achieve carbon neutrality by capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in reservoirs like plants, soil, or the ocean. Despite technological interventions likes these having profound impacts on Earth systems, the field remains overwhelmingly anthropocentric.

Bossert argued that we are currently not in a good empirical or theoretical position to evaluate whether geoengineering methods will be morally permissible in practice, which means this area requires much more empirical and philosophical work that accounts for the sentientism of animals.

Bossert assumes sentience as a precondition for animals having interests in how environments are altered. That is, individuals and groups of animals from different species will experience the harms and benefits of geoengineering, which makes asking “which method will harm or benefit which animals?” a decisive question of justice. Lack of research is a major problem for developing theories of interspecies justice that could answer this question because such theories must provide arguments for how to distribute the benefits and burdens of applying geoengineering at global, intergenerational, and interspecies levels, while ideally ensuring that power asymmetries do not lead to negative consequences for weaker parties.

There are many forms of geoengineering and what their effects on animals might be remains opaque (Photo credit: Chloé Bolton).

That individuals and groups of different species will be impacted by climate engineering is clear, but the nature of this impact, including its implications for their relationships with humans, remain uncertain. Sulphur Aerosol Injection (SAI), for example, is a proposed form of geoengineering that involves injecting sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere to mimic the natural cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions. This intervention could lead to significant changes in precipitation patterns, increase the acidification of some water bodies, and possibly expose populations of animals to harmful aerosols. Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) is a proposed solar radiation management technique that involves spraying sea salt particles into low-lying marine clouds to make them more reflective creating a cooling effect that could protect coral reefs, but the uneven distribution of these benefits could create new problems that impact wildlife mobility and reproduction. Both SAI and MCB have given some consideration to the effects of the technological intervention for the lives of animals, but Bossert ultimately concluded that the limited data currently available to illustrate their effects meant that initiating them could be unjust.

The lively discussion that followed Bossert’s talk focused less on the lack of empirical research into geoengineering and more on the question with which Bossert began her talk: should we try to engineer the climate to fix human caused environmental disaster or should we address the root of the problem by changing the way we live (at least in the Global North)? Personally, I am always suspicious of attempts to solve a problem we created by further interfering with the environment (we never have enough data, and ecosystems are too complex for us to understand or manage). Bossert agreed that this was the main issue at stake, but because strong interventionism seems to be the preferred strategy of those in authority and of environmental scientists, she said we need to consider and analyse the ethical problems and consequences of these technologies, also raising awareness of the plight of non-human animals.