In my keynote at the World Conference on Climate Change and Sustainability (Frankfurt, Germany), I shared insight to future climate responsibility in the context of New Space tourism. The conference, held during the World´s Climate Week in September 2022, offered an interdisciplinary forum for the discussions on the global impact of climate change and global warming.

The need to step up is global and urgent

The focus of the conference was to advance the global efforts on climate transparency. Educators and academics shared best practice curricular and pedagogical models for building future climate literacy in university students.

The conference conveyed some of the key climate issues, such as how quickly the Earth is barreling toward the 2 degrees Celsius warming threshold set by the Paris Climate Accords in 2015.

A mutual key notion was that all countries, businesses, and citizens should urgently step up to meet the challenges of the global climate emergency. A set of solutions was presented, such as encouraging technological innovations and ecosystem management to disrupt the effects of climate change.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was forecasted to become one of the key elements in scaling up the world’s efforts in adapting to the inevitable effects of climate change. For example, a utilization of different AI related solutions could form new trend patterns, found in data through constant machine learning.

Artificial climate modification was also introduced as a practical solution to try to cool down the Earth´s increasing temperature. However, there are many issues, including ethical, attached in any further climate manipulation made by humans.

By artificial climate engineering, the reflectivity of the atmosphere would be manipulated so that a vast part of the sun´s radiation could be reflected back to space; imitating the impacts of volcanic eruptions. Another alternative could be the usage of sodium chloride (sea water), which also reflects the sun´s radiation back to space if spread to small enough particles in the upper atmosphere.

Such activities could (at least in theory) be accomplished with airplanes or even space rockets.

Future actions

To conclude, future climate change related actions could involve increased amounts of climate change related monitoring, achieved for example through New Space industry satellites. The data gained could support new global scale planning processes to achieve more holistic sustainability, which besides environmental impact also involves local scale economic and social impact.

Secondly, there should be enhanced exploration to new mechanisms and technologies for more effective sustainable resource management.

Thirdly, there should be on-going involvement and integration of all different stakeholders and actors, on communal, national and international levels, for increased environmental sustainability.

Lastly, there should be more interdisciplinary examples and studies created by researchers from different fields helping to further examine and forecast future climate change related scenarios.

Picture: www.shutterstock.com