From Bill Gates' funding of research into reflecting solar radiation back into space, to Cornell University scientists' proposals to store carbon by burying forests underground, geoengineering is increasingly winning the case to be taken seriously as a response to the climate crisis. Once dismissed as fringe science, it is now debated in the pages of Nature, with tech optimists arguing human reason and technology give us the capacity and the obligation to actively manage planetary systems. But the risks are substantial. Harvard's solar geoengineering programme acknowledges that it could disrupt monsoon patterns, causing severe droughts affecting billions. And philosophers from Bruno Latour to John Gray have argued that the very idea of humanity mastering nature was always an Enlightenment delusion—one that got us into the crisis in the first place.

Should we abandon the idea that we can ever have dominion over nature? Should we reject geoengineering solutions to the climate crisis as deeply misguided? Or should we see geoengineering as a valuable and potentially vital response to radical climate change?

Editor of The BREAK-DOWN Adrienne Buller, astrophysicist Adam Frank, and award-winning researcher Laurie Laybourn debate geoengineering: promise and peril.

In partnership with SCRI