Governing Solar Radiation Modification in International Law: The Case for an International Climate Interventions Agreement and the African Union’s Normative Response
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/2521-2583/21552Keywords:
solar radiation modification, climate justice, precautionary principle, African Union law, transboundary environmental harm, norm entrepreneurship, International Climate Interventions AgreementAbstract
Solar radiation modification (SRM) technologies, particularly stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening, represent one of the most consequential and ungoverned frontiers in contemporary climate governance. These technologies propose deliberate, large-scale interventions in Earth’s radiative balance to reduce surface temperatures without addressing underlying greenhouse gas concentrations. Their deployment at scale would alter global and regional precipitation systems, agricultural conditions, and water resources, producing cross-border effects that existing international law is structurally unprepared to govern. This article advances a single core claim: existing international law is structurally insufficient to regulate SRM, and African states will bear the greatest burden of this regulatory failure. The argument proceeds in three analytical stages. First, the article demonstrates that current treaty regimes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the London Protocol, and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, contain fragmented, non-binding, or jurisdictionally limited provisions that leave SRM research and deployment effectively unconstrained. Second, it establishes that customary international law, encompassing the no-harm principle, due diligence obligations, the precautionary principle, permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and intergenerational equity, already imposes substantive and presently binding constraints on SRM activities, generating state responsibility for foreseeable transboundary harm. Third, drawing on African Union (AU) legal instruments, particularly Article 24 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights alongside peer-reviewed African climate science, the article demonstrates that SRM poses foreseeable, disproportionate, and legally cognisable risks to African agricultural systems, West African monsoon dynamics, Southern African precipitation regimes, and East African water resources. On this foundation, the article proposes a detailed International Climate Interventions Agreement with a consent-based decision-making architecture, strict liability provisions, emergency exception criteria, and an AU norm entrepreneurship strategy for its negotiation. The normative conclusion is that the AU’s proactive leadership in negotiating this treaty is both legally justified by binding obligations under existing law and strategically essential to prevent unilateral technological deployment that would reproduce colonial patterns of risk externalisation. African leadership is not a policy option; it is a legal imperative.
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Accepted 2026-06-27
Published 2026-10-15
