Governance and Risk Assessment

Atmospheric intervention governance has been stalled by a structural problem: policymakers are asked to govern technologies that do not exist in a specific, evaluable form. The delivery mechanism is typically hand-waved as "a fleet of high-altitude aircraft", too familiar to feel like it needs new governance, too vague to generate specific regulatory questions.

CCI's governance program addresses this by producing the specific technical and analytical inputs that governance frameworks require: how a given architecture affects verifiability and attribution, what monitoring infrastructure would be needed, how fixed-location delivery systems differ from distributed ones in governance terms, and where on the governance spectrum a given application falls.

Different applications carry different governance requirements. We map this spectrum explicitly:

• Volcanic and impact winter responses sit within existing disaster-response governance frameworks, where precedents exist and political obstacles are lowest.
• Targeted ecosystem protection (such as MCB for coral reef preservation) raises regional governance questions with a smaller set of stakeholders.
• Anthropogenic SRM raises the hardest governance questions: free-driver risks, mitigation deterrence, distributional justice, termination shock, and the absence of a legitimate multilateral decision-making body.

CCI believes governance must develop before deployment capability. A technology that proves ungovernable should be treated as ungovernable, regardless of its technical promise. We engage governance scholars, policymakers, climate-vulnerable states, and critics of geoengineering, not only supporters.