Africa Is Not a Solar Geoengineering Test Site

Africa is suffering some of the worst consequences of a climate crisis that it did not create. As rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts, and floods devastate communities and ecosystems across the continent, those in the west who are most responsible for global warming are cooking up plans to test speculative climate fixes in African countries. This gamble with the future of the continent—and the planet—is a grave act of climate injustice and an affront to African leaders, many of whom have publicly expressed their concerns about the promotion and normalisation of such technologies.

Perhaps most unsettling is the growing effort to study and implement solar geoengineering (also called solar radiation modification, or SRM), a set of high-risk technologies that seek to reflect sunlight back into space to cool the planet. This strategy does not address the underlying causes of climate change, nor does it offer a long-term adaptation solution. Instead, it would temporarily treat the symptoms, all while causing unanticipated—and potentially disastrous—consequences.

The risks associated with solar geoengineering are profound, particularly in climate-vulnerable Africa. SRM could change rainfall patterns and interfere with monsoons, potentially endangering food systems, displacing communities, and causing ecosystem collapse. Moreover, the prospect of outside actors testing such planetary-scale interventions in African countries echoes the many harmful medical, agricultural, and economic experiments on Black people and communities throughout history.

More broadly, the global north’s rush to expand solar-geoengineering research in the global south raises serious concerns about power, equity, and justice in global climate governance— especially about who is setting the research agenda. True, some of the world’s biggest SRM funders have proclaimed their commitment to include African scientists in knowledge creation. But it is necessary to consider whose interests are being served by this research trajectory. African scientists are increasingly being drawn into initiatives largely funded and shaped by actors in the global north. The result is a growing asymmetry: African researchers provide knowledge, data, and legitimacy, but the real decisions are made elsewhere.