Pardee Fellow Featured in Documentary

Pardee fellow Pablo Suarez will appear in a documentary on geoengineering that premieres on November 25 at 9pm on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News Channel. The film, entitled “Playing God with Planet Earth?”, explores the last ditch efforts of scientists and engineers trying to avert a planetary meltdown through solar radiation management and other techniques aimed at deliberately modifying our climate system to moderate climate change. The film includes interviews with leading proponents of geoengineering, as well as cautioning perspectives such as Dr. Suarez’s.

Through his work with the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre, Pablo Suarez has supported vulnerable communities such as the fishing village of Doun Baba Dieye in Northern Senegal, featured in the documentary to draw the analogy with geoengineering in terms of the inequitable distribution of losses when decisions aimed to alleviate a problem through intentional manipulation of natural systems lead to lethal surprises. As a researcher on climate and disasters, Pablo Suarez has written on the need for a people-centered framework for geoengineering governance. He was also a panelist at the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies held in March 2010. He is currently working on a piece on geoengineering and development, expected to be published through the Pardee Center “issues in brief” series.