Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change

The Centre for Future Generations (CFG) Climate Interventions Programme welcomes the call for inputs. Rather than repeating existing analyses of the human rights implications of climate-related technologies, this submission focuses on the implications for future generations (i.e., generations born in the future) and other vulnerable groups. It aims to advance a more nuanced understanding of how these technologies can both support and undermine human rights.

The Governance Challenge of Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)

Climate-related technologies can complement mitigation and adaptation efforts, but they also raise distinct human rights and governance questions. This is especially true for Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), which could produce transboundary, uneven, and potentially irreversible effects on people, livelihoods, and ecosystems.

Problem: Current discussions often frame SRM decisions as technocratic, simple technology-risk versus climate-risk choice that oversimplifies the human dimension.

Proposed approach: Adopt a human rights-based risk-risk^[1] approach to guide research, assessment, and any potential governance of SRM.

Rationale: Decision-making must compare escalating harms of inadequately mitigated climate change against the uncertain risks of technological intervention, while explicitly protecting the rights of those least responsible for climate change and future generations who will bear the longest-term consequences.

Core Principles for SRM Decision-Making

Any consideration of SRM should be guided by a precautionary, rights-based, and justice-oriented approach that prioritises:

• Vulnerable populations and groups, as well as future generations;
• Biodiversity, ecosystems and the integrity of the land, ocean, hydrological cycles, and other non-human systems are inextricably linked to the full enjoyment of present and future human rights. 

Problem: Inaction or insufficient mitigation is not a neutral baseline, it already creates severe and compounding human rights risks.

Proposed approach: Assess SRM within the broader context of climate change^[2], examining how risks and benefits are distributed across populations, regions, and generations.

Rationale: This ensures decisions account for foreseeable harms, irreversibility, uncertainty in Earth systems^[3], and the need to avoid shifting burdens onto the least responsible or least powerful groups.

Groups and Rights Most Affected

Problem: The burdens and benefits of SRM are unlikely to be distributed equally in terms of physical impacts or decision-making power.

Proposed approach: Explicitly centre the rights and interests of Indigenous Peoples, rural and coastal communities, Global Majority populations, low-income and marginalised groups, and future generations.

Rationale: These groups face heightened exposure to both climate change and potential SRM side-effects, while often being excluded from decision-making. Key rights at risk include the rights to life, health, food, water, a clean environment^[4], self-determination^[5], and procedural rights (information, participation, and remedy). Ecosystem integrity^[6] must also be protected, as it underpins human rights across generations.

Future generations are a distinct category of rights-holders whose interests are currently underrepresented, despite bearing the greatest long-term consequences of both action and inaction. Both premature or poorly governed deployment could impose irreversible or long-lasting environmental and social risks on those not yet born. On the other hand, a failure to adequately research, assess, and govern SRM today could leave future generations without the knowledge, institutional capacity, or technological options they may need in scenarios of severe climate overshoot.

Information, Participation, and Remedy

Problem: SRM involves high uncertainty, long time horizons, and uneven risk distribution, making meaningful participation difficult.

Proposed approach: Implement anticipatory governance through strategic foresight, scenario planning, and inclusive participatory mechanisms (e.g., citizens’ assemblies with intersectional representation which seek to amplify voices across various groups, especially marginalised ones affected by different layers of discrimination and vulnerabilities).

Rationale: These tools make future harms and trade-offs visible today, enabling more informed, equitable, and legitimate decisions^[7]. Good practices include early transparency on research objectives and funding, accessible grievance mechanisms, and dedicated representation for future generations (distinct from current youth structures)^[8].

Key challenges remain: information asymmetries, limited non-expert engagement, and the absence of international standards for participation and expressing consent in the use of technologies with global effects.

Strengthening Intergovernmental Governance

Problem: Governance of climate-related technologies remains institutionally fragmented across human rights bodies, environmental treaty regimes, and scientific assessment processes^[9].

Proposed approach:

• Build stronger institutional linkages and create an international mechanism for sharing scenario planning^[10], impact assessments, and rights-based approaches.
• Establish a public registry of SRM research, funding, and experiments, supported by improved monitoring and verification capacity.

Rationale: Enhanced transparency of SRM research activities , monitoring of tests and deployment, and cooperation between countries could build trust, deter unilateral action, counter misinformation, and ensure human rights are systematically integrated into decision-making.

The Right to Science

Problem: Research into climate-related technologies, particularly SRM, risks being driven by commercial interests or conducted without adequate safeguards.

Proposed approach: Public authorities must fulfil the right to science by ensuring access to research that is transparent, collaborative, and oriented toward the public interest. Private companies, funders, and researchers must apply human rights due diligence and the precautionary principle, with data, methods, and knowledge made accessible in the public domain.

Rationale: Clear separation between research and deployment is essential. Existing frameworks (e.g., Oxford Principles and the 2017 Code of Conduct for Responsible Geoengineering Research) provide a useful starting point but must be strengthened with binding oversight, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms.

Conclusion

Climate-related technologies such as SRM highlight complex risk-risk trade-offs. The central question is not whether risks exist, but how they are distributed across groups and generations, and whether they can be governed consistently with human rights.

A human rights-based approach demands precaution, equity and justice ensuring that those most exposed to risks, especially Indigenous Peoples, rural and coastal communities, Global Majority populations, low-income and marginalised groups are not further burdened and that transparency, accountability and meaningful participation are embedded in all stages of responsible SRM research and governance.

It requires recognising future generations as distinct rights-holders and ensuring that consideration of climate interventions does not distract from the urgent priority of emissions reductions, mitigation, and adaptation.

Ultimately, the governance of these technologies must be anchored in the protection of human rights and the integrity of Earth’s systems, recognising that the wellbeing of current and future generations is inseparable.