Geoengineering : the ethical and social issues

Tese de doutoramento, Filosofia (Filosofia da Natureza e do Ambiente), Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2015Since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), responses to address climate change have fallen within two major groups of strategies, namely: mitigation measures, which comprise all human interventions to reduce the anthropogenic forcing of the climate system, such as reducing greenhouse gas sources and emissions and enhancing greenhouse gas sinks, and adaptation measures, which include any adjustments made to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected impacts of climate change, with the aim of moderating harm or exploiting beneficial opportunities. However, another strategy to limit the impacts and consequences of climate change has been gaining ground over the past decade: the idea of geoengineering, commonly defined as the “deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (The Royal Society, 2009: 1). The self-assertive invasion of nature’s various domains, the scale and complexity of the technoscientific tasks involved, the unpredictable long-term impacts of geoengineering actions, and the huge uncertainties that these proposals raise point to a shift in the nature of human action that requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility. Through this dissertation I hope to offer a perspective from which the very nature of geoengineering proposals can be brought into question, so as to better focus on and deal with the fundamental issues that geoengineering proposals entail. Accordingly, the aim of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the far-reaching ethical and social implications of these proposals and, to that end, find an adequate vantage point from which to address the following research questions: Why is geoengineering becoming a part of the portfolio of response options to anthropogenic climate change? What ‘imaginaries’ of science and technology underlie geoengineering debates? How plausible are current geoengineering proposals? What are the expectations, the embedded values, and the ways of making sense of a geoengineered world? What kind of ethical framework can serve as a basis for assessing geoengineering proposals and inform policy responses to geoengineering governance?European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC

Agency in the Internet of Things

This report summarises and extends the work done for the task force on IoT terminated in 2012. In response to DG CNECT request, the JRC studied this emergent technology following the methodologies pertaining to the Science and Technology Studies field. The aim of this document is therefore to present and to explore, on the basis of present day conceptions of relevant values, rights and norms, some of the “ethical issues” arising from the research, development and deployment of IoT, focusing on agency, autonomy and social justice. We start by exploring the types of imaginaries that seem to be entrenched and inspiring the developments of IoT and how they become portrayed in “normal” communication from corporations and promoters to the ordinary citizen (chapter 2). We report the empirical work we have conducted, namely the JRC contribution to the limited public debate initiated by the European Commission via the Your Voice portal during the Spring of 2012 (chapter 3) and an empirical exercise involving participants of two IoT conferences (chapter 4). This latter exercise sought to illustrate how our notions of goodness, trust, relationships, agency and autonomy are negotiated through the appropriation of unnoticed ordinary objects; this contributes to the discussion about ethical issues at stake with the emerging IoT vision beyond the right to privacy, data protection and security. Furthermore, based on literature review the report reflects on two of the main ethical issues that arise with the IoT vision: agency (and autonomy) and social justice (chapter 5), examining eventually governance alternatives of the challenged ethical issues (chapter 6).JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

Interrogating Privacy in the digital society: media narratives after 2 cases

The introduction of information technology (IT) in the society and its pervasiveness in every aspect of citizens’ daily life highlight societal stakes related to the goals of IT uses, social networks being a most important example. This paper examines two cases which have in common a not straightforward link with privacy as addressed and protected by existing law in Europe (EU) and the United-States (USA), but whose characteristics, we reckon fall on other privacy function and properties. In Western societies individuals rely on normative discourses such as the legal one in order to ensure protection. Hence, the paper argues that other functions of privacy need either further framing into legislation or they need to constitute in themselves normative commitments of an ethical nature for technology development and use. Some initiatives at EU level recall such commitments namely by developing a normative discourse based on ethics and human values. We argue that we need to interrogate society about those normative discourses because the values we once cherished in a non-digital society are seriously being questioned.JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

The constitution of the Hybrid World

The development and widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICT) are having a profound impact in many aspects of our daily lives, transforming the conditions and procedures of work, changing the modes of communication and social interaction, and altering the fundamental nature of human action, insofar as they play an important role in shaping what we do and how we experienced the world. In fact, the re-conceptualisation of the very foundational assumptions of modern societies, the new configurations of natural and social life, and the blurring of ontological categories upon which our political, social and legal orders are based, point to fundamental aspects of the human condition that have been reshaped by the hybridisation processes characterising modern human entanglements with emerging technologies. Despite the constitutional nature of these transformations, the basic rules that bind a state to its citizens have undergone small adjustments and accommodations. This not only shows how constitutional rights continue to be regarded as the most stable elements of national life, but also calls attention to the need of looking for the ways in which unwritten and emergent rules of constitutional dimension are being crafted. Where can we observe the new constitutional order that is emerging at the present moment? What fundamental aspects of human life are being transformed by the mediated role played by new ICT? What are the far-reaching ethical, legal and social implications of these transformations? In what way the most fundamental human rights and the most fundamental relations between states and citizens are being reframed in view of cross-cutting transformations in law and new ICT? In this report we propose to address these questions by focusing our analysis on complex forms of mediation and translation that emerge from the use of the Internet and other ICT-based network arrangements.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

Questioning the Geoengineering Scientific Worldview

Over the last few years, geoengineering, or the ‘deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming’, has attracted increasing attention among strategies to limit the impact and consequences of climate change. However, the understanding of the physical science basis of geoengineering is still limited, and there are still major uncertainties concerning the impacts these technologies might have on human and natural systems. The self-assertive invasion of nature’s various domains, the scale and complexity of the technoscientific tasks involved, the unpredictable long-term impacts of geoengineering actions, and the huge uncertainties that these proposals raise point to a shift in the nature of human action that requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility. If there is a decision to embark on such an ambitious project, a major effort should be made to scrutinise and gain a deeper understanding of the geoengineering scientific worldview. In fact, the full meaning of geoengineering proposals can only be grasped in the context of the larger social imaginary of science and technology in which geoengineering narratives are rooted. In this paper, two different contextual frameworks from which to address these issues are presented and analysed. The first represents the mainstream Earth System Science perspective, while the second corresponds to an alternative view from the field of social studies of science and technology. Central to both is the concept of an ‘epochal break’. In the former, this is in terms of the Human-Earth relationship, in the latter, in terms of the relationship between science, technology and society. It is hoped that this approach may contribute to clearing the path towards more open and critical reflection about the competing interests, values and assumptions of climate engineering proposals.JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

Towards an Analytical Framework for Evaluating the Ethical Dimensions of Geoengineering Proposals

Over the last few years, geoengineering, or the ‘deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate in order to moderate global warming’, has been attracting increasing attention within the portfolio of strategies to limit the impact and consequences of climate change. However, this ‘plan B’ is inevitably conditioned by our limited understanding of the scientific basis of climate change, and by major uncertainties regarding the impacts these technologies might have on human and natural systems. Therefore, in spite of the controversy prevailing in the debates surrounding geoengineering technologies, there is widespread agreement on the need to consider the far-reaching ethical and social questions that intentional climate change proposals entail. Although some attempts have been made to address this need (and to further ethical awareness amongst the scientific community), an ethical framework that could inform policy responses to geoengineering research, deployment and governance has yet to be developed. In this sense, the overall objective of this paper is to address the need to develop an analytical framework that can contribute to a better understanding of the ethical and social issues raised by geoengineering proposals, and that can be used as the basis for further analysis with a view to developing and implementing appropriate governance mechanisms to steer both geoengineering research and deployment.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

Imag[in]ing geoengineering – the plausible and the implausible

The universe of geoengineering is filled with all sorts of imageries. They are all part of the geoengineering story, revealing facts, knowledge, values, fears, desires, promises, anxieties, incredulity, about not only the idea of deliberately manipulating Earth’s climate to offset anthropogenic climate change, but also, and above all, what we know about the world and how we make sense of our place in it. In this context, where geoengineering can be seen as an illustrative metaphor of particular technological promises and ‘upstream solutions’ of modern technoscientific societies, we stress the relevance of considering the continuum between imaging and imagining (imag[in]ing) in order to examine the plausibility of current geoengineering proposals. By suggesting that the visual representations of geoengineering should be seen as pictorial narratives, we draw on Walter Fisher’s homo narrans metaphor. Thus, adopting the concept of ‘narrative rationality’, we propose to analyse the sense making structures of a set of selected visual narratives of geoengineering and to test them against the principles of narrative probability and narrative fidelity.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

EXPLORING THE ETHICS OF GEOENGINEERING THROUGH IMAGES

Since the beginning of this century, the purpose and extent of intentional climate change proposals seem to have surpassed its original concepts and been appropriated by the various competing interests that inform the climate change debate. Indeed, many of the problems and uncertainties that geoengineering schemes evoke are feeding environmental controversies, while discourses become more and more politicized. In this context, the study of geoengineering narratives not only helps to unveil the ethical issues surrounding climate engineering experimentation, regulation and deployment, but also suggests an alternative way of looking at the climate change issue and the ‘scalar dislocations’ that it introduces into modern systems of experience and understanding [1]. Assuming that geoengineering is an illustrative metaphor of a particular kind of technoscientific promises and “technological fix” narratives that are emerging in our society, this paper seeks to analyse the value disputes hidden in geoengineering debates by adopting expanded notions of narrative, which account for the particular ways of rendering the world in both visual and verbal forms. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to an understanding of the potential of visual narrative research, while also considering the ethical issues in scientific and technological developments. In particular, it tries to suggest possible ways of exploring the meaning-making practices of production (encoding) and interpretation (decoding) of geoengineering images in order to analyse the contributions that visual methodologies can provide to enable us to understand the nature and causes of scientific and technological developments, the benefits and the risks, the perils and the promises of recent advances in science and technology and, last but not the least, the limits of rational analytical methods when it comes to characterizing complex problems.JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

Modelo de desenvolvimento de curricula em estudos pós-graduados em ciência e sistemas de informação geográfica

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciência e Sistemas de Informação GeográficaO objectivo geral da pesquisa a realizar no âmbito da presente dissertação consistiu no estabelecimento de um modelo de desenvolvimento de cur r icula em estudos pós-graduados em Ciência e Sistemas de Informação Geográfica. A pesquisa realizada sugeriu a necessidade de enquadrar o processo de desenvolvimento curricular sob diferentes perspectivas: no quadro das principais reformas do ensino superior conducentes à implementação do Processo de Bolonha; no actual contexto de avanço tecnológico e evolução do conhecimento na área da Ciência e Sistema s de Informação Geográfica, e, por último, na perspectiva da utilização de novas tecnologias no processo de desenvolvimento e exploração de cur r icula. Com vista ao enquadramento do problema em análise foi feita uma breve revisão das concepções e teorias curriculares, no pressuposto que a noção perfilhada de cur r iculum determina a natureza e o âmbito do processo de desenvolvimento curricular. A qualidade do programa de estudos, os métodos de ensino a implementar, e os objectivos e expectativas associadas ao processo de desenvolvimento curricular, conduziram ao estabelecimento de uma metodologia de desenvolvimento de cur r icula em Ciência e Sistemas de Informação Geográfica que procura dar resposta a um conjunto de desafios e oportunidades que se colocam a diferentes níveis (cognitivos, pedagógicos, sociais, político-institucionais e tecnológicos). A abordagem proposta traduz as preocupações de integração e articulação do curriculum , a necessidade de estabelecer um modelo de desenvolvimento curricular que proporcione a inovação e o melhoramento efectivo do curriculum e, por último, a criação das condições necessárias para dar continuidade a esses processos

Do-it-yourself justice: considerations of social media use in a crisis situation: The case of the 2011 Vancouver riots

On the 15th June 2011 the ice hockey Stanley Cup final series between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins took place in Vancouver. As the Vancouver Canuks were losing, riots started downtown Vancouver. Social media were used to communicate among authorities and citizenry including the rioters. The media reporting these events engages with different narratives, which in turn invoke different ethical considerations. This paper identifies those narratives and reflects upon the ideas of justice, fairness, responsibility, accountability and integrity as key ethical considerations. The paper also identifies some challenges arising from the use of social media in crisis situations.JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit