Contextualizing Climate Engineering and Mitigation: Illusion, Complement, or Substitute? (CEMICS)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer; Professor Jens Hartmann, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Hermann Held; Professor Dr. Elmar Kriegler; Dr. Stefan Schäfer, since 2/2017; Professor Dr. Harald Stelzer
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics ; Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry ; Palaeontology ; Atmospheric Science ; Practical Philosophy ; Economic Theory
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236842296

CEMICS is driven by the hypothesis that society will not take decisions on climate engineering (CE) in isolation, but in consideration of the whole portfolio of existing climate policy options. The ongoing work within that project (in the following called CEMICS1 funded through SPP 1689) puts CE in the context of mitigation by asking to what extent (combinations of) CE options would provide synergies or compete with mitigation options (i.e. would act as complements of or substitutes for mitigation). This integrated assessment of CE and mitigation strategies is subjected to ethical reasoning asking what amount of implementation of CE options would be admissible under what ethical framings. While CEMICS1 will deliver such a prototypical assessment and ethical evaluation of CE in the context of mitigation, this follow-up project CEMICS2 will be needed in order to become comprehensive enough for making the results suitable for policy advice. For CEMICS2, we plan to (i) expand our analysis of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to include significant synergies between different CDR options, (ii) take an integrated view on CDR and solar radiation management (SRM), (iii) analyse the role of CE in case of delayed global mitigation policy, and (iv) explore the sensitivity of those results to the overall socio-economic development of global society. Hence CEMICS 2 will advance the analysis performeed by CEMICS1 in terms of comprehensiveness and sophistication. Therefore, CEMICS 2 will search for active ways to feed its results into scientific policy reports, e.g. via large-scale assessment reports such as the planned 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1689: Climate Engineering: Risks, Challenges, Opportunities?
• International Connection: Austria
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Mark G. Lawrence, until 1/2017