The Economics and Governance of Solar Geoengineering

Limited progress on reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has sparked increasing interest in whether the global community should consider the use of solar geoengineering (SGE)—technologies designed to reflect sunlight away from Earth—as a short-term approach to reduce climate change damages. Through theory, surveys, simulations, and experiments, economists have studied the strategic implications of SGE, how these technologies interact with incentives to mitigate GHG emissions, and the challenges of governing them. This article provides a comprehensive review of the literature, starting with how SGE is incorporated into economic models. One issue is whether SGE will crowd out efforts to mitigate GHG or will enhance mitigation efforts. We identify conditions under which each of those results is likely. We review the economics of governing SGE, particularly the issue of a single actor unilaterally deploying SGE to manipulate global temperatures. Our review synthesizes the main findings from the literature with the goal of better informing global climate policies.