Abstract: Article 4 of the United Nations' Paris Agreement, for the first time, commits signatory nations to utilizing carbon sinks - forests, soil, oceans and new-age carbon-capture technologies - to attain the Agreement's objective of limiting the rise of global surface temperature to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Creating carbon sinks, an act of geoengineering, can potentially reduce the high concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which are a cause of climate change phenomena. Geoengineering is, however, distinct from climate engineering. The latter focuses on reducing the global average surface temperature by modifying local weather patterns, not by reducing the underlying greenhouse gas concentrations. This lecture will highlight the distinctions between the two, the geopolitical challenges of climate engineering, the large socio-economic opportunities hidden within geoengineering and how Indiashould devise environmentally-conscious and business-driven climate policies in the future.

Biography: Dr. Chaitanya Giri is the Gateway House Fellow of Space and Ocean Studies. His present research focuses aquapolitics and astropolitics, the new-age techno-geostrategy, the space and marine industrial complex, and the science of space exploration. Prior to Gateway House, Dr. Giri has worked as planetary and astromaterials scientist for nearly a decade. He was affiliated to the Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Geophysical Laboratory at Carnegie Institution for Science, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as an ELSI Origins Network Fellow. He was earlier an International Max Planck Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany and the University of Nice in France. Dr. Giri was also a scientific crew member of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. He is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the 2014 Dieter Rampacher Prize of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Science, Germany and the 2016-2018 ELSI Origins Network Fellowship by the John Templeton Foundation, USA to name a few.