GoKawiilWar-game simulation finds no consensus on rules for solar geoengineering
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London ran a tabletop exercise last September simulating how nations, NGOs, indigenous groups and companies would respond to emerging solar radiation modification technologies. Participants, including roles for governments and tech firms, struggled to agree on ethical guardrails for deploying methods such as spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet. Climate researcher Colleen Golja, who advised players on the science, said she expected easy agreement on ethical research but instead encountered sharp disagreement.
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The exercise suggests that even among experts simulating cooperative scenarios, competing national and corporate interests could derail coordinated oversight of geoengineering, a technology with uneven and uncertain regional effects. This could foreshadow real-world difficulty in preventing an unregulated race to deploy such tools, since some countries might benefit while others, like parts of sub-Saharan Africa, face modeled harms such as drying or intensified storms. The findings imply that technical feasibility of solar geoengineering may outpace the world's ability to govern it fairly.
- A London war game simulated global responses to solar radiation modification technologies.
- Participants representing governments, NGOs, and companies failed to easily agree on ethical guardrails.
- Climate models suggest solar geoengineering could unevenly affect regions, worsening conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: wired.com — Karl Mathiesen, 2026-10-12
Published there as: “They War-Gamed Dimming the Sun. It Went Even Worse Than You Think”
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