Is Geoengineering a Plan 'B' to Himalayas ? -- A short reflection from week10 seminar

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The topic of this week Global Environmental Change Seminar is GeoEngineering - known as ‘plan B’ - to counteract or mitigate the effects of climate change particularly driven by greenhouse gases. From Crutzen, P.J.paper 2006 to present, there has been a surge of attention to it along with debates. Such an intentional intervention to ‘engineer’ the planet has two categories broadly referred as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). 

With good intention to address the climate challenges, the geoengineering proposals are largely theoretical and lack of scientific modelling and empirical research. The most difficult obstacle is the governance, legal and management uncertainties. The future climate projects leave us with a number of questions and an indeterminate picture of everything we would do to respond to what have done to the planet. The U.N. defines “dangerous anthropogenic interference” as inadvertent climate effects, we might ask ourselves to be very careful with the intended geoengineering and its unintended environment consequence, not only on climate system but also on biodiversity, ecosphere and quality of human life. 

 Here would like to share a video link I came across today where it demonstrats the project of building Ladakh’s artificial glaciers. 

Picture from Learning from artificial glaciers in the Himalaya: design for climate change through low-tech infrastructural devices journal of landscape architecture [1862-6033] Clouse Year: 2014 Volume: 9 Issue: 3 Page: 6 -19 Figure 3 In winter, the artificial glacier above the village of Igoo holds ice on site that otherwise would have drained into the Indus River below. Before this glacier was built, the site was dry in the winter months.

Picture from Learning from artificial glaciers in the Himalaya: design for climate change through low-tech infrastructural devices journal of landscape architecture [1862-6033] Clouse Year: 2014 Volume: 9 Issue: 3 Page: 6 -19 1 a, 1b Ladakh is located at the base of the Himalayan mountain range in northern India,




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