It’s a commonplace to argue that scientists and experts need to be talking to and engaging much more with the traditional knowledge folks. What’s less often the case, save for the proverbial call for curing cancer, are examples of mutual benefit of doing so. One priority area for reciprocity, I suggest, is that of geoengineering.
Geoengineering is offered up as a last-ditch effort to save the planet in the midst of its very real climate emergency. Even so, one must wonder: What better way to bring the governments of the world to their collective knees than solutions like those that would ballon the skies with mirrors and sulfur dioxide and the seas with chemical changes to capture more carbon, all because the climate emergency has left humanity no choice—no alternative—but to be unreliable on unprecedented scales?
Such indeed is the rationale for having in place robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems of the geoengineering interventions. Now of course, much of the current debate is about the unintended consequences of geoengineering and about the early warning systems for monitoring and evaluating them. But those consequences are almost exclusively dominated by concerns of global North and South experts and scientists.
I suggest that the major priority of governments and the regulators of geoengineering initiatives–and there is no stopping this experimentation!–is to ensure that the early warning systems for droughts and bad weather still in operation among pastoralists and agriculturists of the developing world are also included and canvassed.
The latter are, I believe, a quite specific case where the intersection of measurable and nonmeasuable indicators is of mutual benefit to far more than the presiding scientists and experts in the Global North and South. For my part, I wonder what will be the decrease (or increase for that matter) in the murders of local “rainmakers” (forecasters) because of geoengineering.
On the murder of rainmakers during drought, please see Isao Murahashi (2024), “Climate change or local justice? On frequent drought and regicide in South Sudan.” Presentation given on August 8 2024 as a part of the International Hyflex Sessions, “Living in the Anthropocene, living in uncertainty: Reconfiguring development and humanitarian assistance as ‘care’ with relational approach,” held at IDS Sussex.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 