Between Necessity and Hubris

The world is hurtling toward climate tipping points faster than mitigation can catch up. Melting ice sheets, a faltering Atlantic circulation, and parched lands are no longer scenarios for 2100—they are the living reality of this decade. And as global emissions continue their stubborn climb, a once-taboo set of options is creeping into mainstream ‘Geoengineering’.

Geoengineering, in this context, refers to large-scale technological interventions designed to deliberately alter the Earth’s climate system as a way to counteract global warming. It spans two main approaches: Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), which seeks to pull existing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and lock them away in soils, oceans, or rocks; and Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which aims to reflect a fraction of the sun’s rays back into space to temporarily cool the planet. Both are seen as potential complements—not substitutes—to cutting emissions, but they come with scientific uncertainties, ecological risks, and profound geopolitical implications.

Carbon Removal: Beyond Planting Trees

CDR is not just about forests and tree cover. Scientists divide the field into at least three categories:

* Land-based methods like biochar, which heat crop residue into a stable soil additive that locks carbon for centuries while improving fertility.

* Geochemical methods like enhanced rock weathering, where ground minerals react with CO₂ and improve soil nutrients or ocean alkalinity.

* Ocean-based strategies, such as large-scale seaweed farming, are theoretically capable of vaulting atmospheric carbon deep into ocean sediments.

The allure is enormous: draw down carbon while delivering co-benefits like healthier soils, better water retention, and stronger biodiversity. But the risks are just as pronounced. Ocean fertilisation could deoxygenate seas. Underground carbon could leak decades later. And the sheer cost of frontier technologies risks creating a monopoly of rich-country laboratories.

What matters, then, is not the dream of carbon removal but the rules under which it operates. Verification systems must guarantee that removals are real and permanent. Storage must be tamper-proof for centuries, not decades. Communities must share in benefits rather than merely bearing risks. In short, this cannot remain an experimental science divorced from people and policy.

The Temptation of a Sunshade

If carbon removal is about cleaning the atmosphere, then SRM is about shielding Earth from heat itself. Think reflective particles in the stratosphere. Think cloud brightening above oceans to scatter sunlight. The effects could be swift: within years, global temperatures might fall.

But so might South Asian monsoons. Rainfall patterns could be diverted. Entire regions could be engineered into drought or abundance, not by accident but by design. SRM is precisely the kind of technology that turns climate change from a natural tragedy into a geopolitical powder keg. Risks such as termination shocks, impacts on climate systems like El Niño, and policy deviations due to geopolitical tensions are inherent perils.

Yet, like forbidden fruit, its very immediacy makes it seductive. The danger is that policymakers fret SRM as a shortcut, sapping urgency from emissions cuts. Worse, if research remains underfunded in the Global South, the rules of planetary sunshades will be written elsewhere, reflecting the priorities of temperate zones over the survival of tropical ones.

Why India Cannot Afford to Sit Out

Here is the paradox: a country like India has virtually no historical responsibility for the atmospheric glut of greenhouse gases, but it faces the sharpest edge of the crisis – irregular monsoons, searing heatwaves, crippling floods. It is precisely the kind of country that should be most cautious about climate tinkering and most invested in shaping its governance.

With modest but strategic investments, India could build its own research capacities on carbon removal and solar radiation management, positioning itself not as a passive rule-taker but an active architect of global norms. The co-benefits alone – better soils, stronger water security, and biodiversity gains – make exploring land-based carbon removal worth embedding within national development.

At the same time, the stakes of absence are immense. While countries like the US and the UK clearly lead the way in investments in CDR and SRM, the Global South significantly lags behind with a mere 2 per cent of global investment share. If the West monopolises experiments in geoengineering, the Global South risks becoming a laboratory for someone else’s risk appetite. In climate politics, as in trade rules, losing the shaping power at the outset means decades of playing catch-up under unfavourable terms.

Governing the Ungovernable

Geoengineering is not only about science but about sovereignty. Who decides if reflective particles are sprayed over the Indian Ocean? Who compensates if rainfall patterns shift disastrously? Who enforces safety when carbon is buried under someone’s soil, someone else’s seabed?

The world has long assumed that answers to such questions must come from universal pacts, UN-led and multilateral. But there is a strong case that the leaner coalition—8 to 10 like‑minded countries—may offer more agility and credible governance. They could test, verify, and set norms without waiting for sluggish consensus-building in vast assemblies. Importantly, they could encode one guiding principle into the blueprint: geoengineering can never substitute mitigation; it can only stand alongside it.

The Choice Before Us

Geoengineering sits precisely where necessity meets hubris. Used wisely, it could open margins of safety for humanity and buy time for the energy transition. Used recklessly, it could fracture atmospheres, geopolitics, and future generations.

For India, the choice is sharper still. To engage is to claim agency; to abstain is to let others decide its monsoon fate. To study geoengineering is not to endorse it, but to ensure we do not wake up one day governed by technologies we had no hand in shaping.

The climate crisis is fast closing the window for gradualism. We are in the age of “all tools on the table.” Geoengineering may never save us, but ignoring it altogether could condemn us to being saved, or destroyed, on someone else’s terms. When the sky itself becomes a sphere of policy, inaction is not neutrality. It is surrender.

Views expressed are personal. S Priyadarshi is the President, S Kurian is Research Consultant & Executive Assistant, both at Chintan Research Foundation