**3. Intergenerational justice in geoengineering**

Geological history shows that there is a global impact for any local climatic intervention. The temporal impact of such interventions cannot also be confined to a particular period. This fact is of particular importance in geoengineering as it is self-evident that the impact of the climatic interventions by this generation will not be confined to this generation. The future generations are naturally brought into the debate on the ethics of geoengineering. This is how intergenerational justice is of decisive value in the geoengineering debate. While distributive justice is challenged by the spatial factors resulting from geoengineering, intergenerational justice is challenged by the temporal imbalances.

The proprieties of distributing harms and benefits between the present and future generations is the focus of intergenerational justice. It assumes that natural resources are not to be entitled unlimitedly to any particular generation. As custodians of natural resources, each generation has to fulfil its obligations to the future generations. It involves the safe custody and preservation of the natural resources for the sustenance of the future generations. This is the reason why intergenerational justice forms a major component in any theory of ethics. It is a happy state of affairs that due importance is given to this principle in international treaties and conventions. There can be no fair treatment of justice in geoengineering without adequately appropriating the challenges to intergenerational justice.

As we discuss below, the contested issues of intergenerational justice in geoengineering revolve around the concerns over the problem of sudden termination of SAG, questions concerning the agencies of pollution, the challenge of moral hazard caused by the technical interventions, the danger of treating the symptom over the cause, and the present generation transferring the risk to future generations.

### **3.1 Responsibility of the current generation**

The paradoxical issue in intergenerational justice in geoengineering is that future generations are forced to bear the brunt the harms caused by the unnatural ways followed by the current generation. The policies and practices of the present generation concerning development and the consumption of natural resources are largely instrumental in creating a situation of having to geoengineer. However, the effects of geoengineering by this generation will be transferred to the future generations [27, 28, 35, 48–56]. This implies that this generation will reap the benefits by transferring the risks and harms to the future generations. This is often termed as the risk-transfer argument [54] or responsibility abdication objection [57]. A fair practice in this regard would be the polluter-pays principle. This principle, formulated by Betz and Casean [27] assumes that those who caused the dangerous climate changes should also pay for it. Abdicating our responsibility for the dangerous climate change imply that the present generation lets itself off from its offences.
