The recently published Emissions Gap Report 2024 warns that international ambitions must be dramatically raised or the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal will be gone soon. The current COP 29 conference is unlikely to deliver, however, and with new emission records for 2024 just confirmed and climate impacts intensifying, there is an increasing push for more contentious ideas, such as geoengineering the fragile West Antarctic Ice sheet. While there are several technical and environmental concerns, what has been largely overlooked are the political risks of such an endeavour, in particular challenges to the authority, sovereignty, and security of the Antarctic Treaty System.
The losses of West Antarctic and the Greenlandic ice sheets are the most at risk planetary tipping points in the Earth System. According to the 2024 State of the Cryosphere Report, which was presented in an event at the Baku COP last week, both ice sheets’ threshold for irreversible collapse will be crossed even with current pledged emissions cuts, which would result in a 2.3°C increase by 2100. Such a collapse would subject the world to around 10 metres of mean global sea-level rise over just a few centuries, and there is now a growing scientific debate about whether the ice sheets could be stabilized through glacial geoengineering or artificial infrastructures to stop or slow down ice-sheet collapse.
Geoengineering Polar Glaciers?
The proposals usually target the small number of outlet glacier systems in the Amundsen Sea Embayment through which the ice sheets flow into the ocean. These glaciers, among them Thwaites Glaciers, the so called “doomsday glacier”, act like plugs by supporting the ice sheet behind them. Initial engineering ideas to stabilize these glaciers range from pumping up and refreezing meltwater from their base, which acts like a lubricant, to building artificial islands in order to buttress ice shelves and the ice sheets behind them. Current research focusses on the idea of building an 80-kilometre-long “curtain” on the seabed in order to stop warm ocean water from reaching a glacier’s grounding line. It is this undersea curtain idea that has attracted the attention not only of the media, but also of philanthropic and business actors lately.
Like with other geoengineering proposals, these have been the object of significant criticism from the outset. The main critiques expressed so far argue that such geoengineering efforts are unlikely to be effective and are likely to have unforeseeable environmental consequences. Furthermore, there is a concern that the pursuit of geoengineering ideas will distract from much needed climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Additionally, the proposed geoengineering infrastructures would not exist in a governance vacuum.
Governing Geoengineering?
Generally, geoengineering governance research exhibits a tendency to make best-case assumptions about global cooperation. Scholars have urged that more attention be paid to “the international fragmentation of world politics and histories”. The Antarctic Treaty System is often hailed as a role model for international cooperation, but there are crucial geopolitical fault-lines in the system that need to be more seriously considered in the glacial geoengineering debate. Unlike other types of geoengineering governance where a lack of regulation poses the main challenge, for glacial geoengineering in the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean there is a clear regulative context. Whether one supports or opposes glacial geoengineering interventions in Antarctica, this existing political and legal context matters. Even if the ice curtain idea were to be technically feasible and environmentally harmless, this type of geoengineering has the potential to undo the current governance arrangements in the Antarctic, which has successfully kept the southern continent “a natural reserve, dedicated to peace and science” for over six decades.
In a new paper published in International Affairs (co-authored with Akiho Shibata from Kobe University in Japan), we argue that the proposed infrastructures could violate the “peaceful purpose” obligation enshrined in the Antarctic Treaty. By impacting contentious areas of Antarctic geopolitics, such as authority, sovereignty, and security, there is a significant risk that the project would make the Antarctic “the scene or object of international discord”, which, according to the preamble of the Treaty, is something it should not be.
Risking “International Discord”?
First, who makes the decisions regarding the implementation of glacial geoengineering experiments and infrastructures? Who has the authority to commit future generations to maintaining such infrastructures for up to several centuries? In the past, the 29 states that hold decision-making powers within the Antarctic Treaty System (among them the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet) have already faced the criticism that they are an unrepresentative, small club of rich countries. Would Pacific Island nations – none of them has decision-making powers at the annual Antarctic meetings – have a say if the largely high-emitting Antarctic players from the Global North promised to “save them” from sea-level rise through glacial geoengineering? On what moral or legal basis could Pacific Island voices be left unheard here because they are not represented in the Antarctic regime?
Further, in our climate-changed world, Antarctic environments cannot be protected through environmental regulations in the Antarctic itself, but only through adequate climate mitigation measures in the main global economies. This so called paradox of Antarctic environmental protection blurs Antarctic and international environmental protection and may be exacerbated by the geoengineering issue. Hence, geoengineering may challenge the exclusive political authority that Antarctic nations established and developed within the international system over the past 60 years.
Second, while territorial claims in the Antarctic have been famously “frozen” by Article IV of the Antarctic Treaty, it is important to remember that they have been preserved and not taken off the table completely. Sovereignty considerations have thus informed the decision-making of most of the claimant states regarding where and how they set up research stations and other infrastructure components. In this regard, it matters very much which actor is funding, building, and maintaining glacial geoengineering infrastructures and the related logistical operations, as this of course also allows them to project power into the Antarctic (even when one day the current treaty system might not be in place any longer).
Third, if effective, glacial geoengineering infrastructures could be considered critical infrastructure on a planetary scale. The safety and welfare of the over 400 million people living in coastal regions around the globe would depend on the infrastructure’s safe operation. This raises the question of the secondary security of these installations as they could be sabotaged or targeted by terrorists or for blackmail. The infrastructures will need to be monitored and protected accordingly, which would have major consequences for policing and the use of force in the Antarctic, bearing in mind that this is a continent that is currently demilitarized and the only one on planet Earth to have never seen war. This security aspect and its implications for Antarctic affairs is wholly absent in the governance discourse that is supportive of glacial geoengineering ideas like the undersea curtain.
Anticipating Future Contestations?
We urge the scholarly debate about glacial geoengineering infrastructures in the Antarctic to discuss the largely understated or neglected governance risks to the Antarctic Treaty System more seriously. Political feasibility and the desirability of such an undertaking matter as much as technical feasibility or environmental desirability.
Further, Antarctic diplomats and policy observers are well advised to follow the growing debate about glacial geoengineering and take also note of the governance risks of such proposals. Glacial geoengineering has not been raised as a political option at Antarctic conferences yet, but we contend that it is not unreasonable – given the urgency and global scale of the consequences of WAIS collapsing – that glacial geoengineering will be proposed politically as a solution at some point in the medium-term future. By treating glacial geoengineering as an anticipatory challenge – instead of waiting for the issue to manifest itself as a political conflict issue – it is still possible to inform, shape, and make visible the likely contours of the future contestation of the issue, for scholars as much as for policymakers.
Patrick Flamm
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