Giving Compass' Take:

• Sarah Sax explains how a lack of diversity in a geoengineering project led to a failure that could have been avoided if more perspectives were included. 

• How can funders work to build a more diverse talent pool and encourage qualified people from different backgrounds to join geoengineering efforts? 

• Learn about the need for investment in STEM talent at historically black colleges. 

A group of British scientists had a plan for a groundbreaking geoengineering test. Working from a disused military airstrip in Norfolk, U.K., they would attach a 3,000-foot hose to a helium balloon, pump water into it, and spray the liquid into the atmosphere, where it would evaporate. The hardware test was part of a bigger plan to see if strategically releasing aerosols might help cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. Known as the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering, or Spice, project, it was run by three U.K. research councils and backed by four universities, several government departments, and the private company Marshall Aerospace.

They presented their plans to the public at the British Science Festival in the fall of 2011 — and triggered a “fiasco,” as an editorial in the journal Nature described it. Scientists bickered over it, newspapers ran negative headlines, and a Canadian NGO launched a campaign to urge the U.K. government to cancel the trial. Within months, the project was dead.

Solar radiation management is one of the more controversial geoengineering tactics under development, and some critics faulted the group for not trying hard enough to inform the public of its plans or of the potential risks. Jack Stilgoe, a sociologist at University College London, says he joined the Spice project in 2012 to help the scientists make sense of what had gone wrong. “What is clear is that most of the research has been done by a very small, exclusive group of people,” Stilgoe says.

As scientists continue to advocate for further development of such technologies, the field’s demographics are drawing more scrutiny. Some researchers argue the lack of diversity affects both which geoengineering projects get discussed — whether Spice-style solar radiation management, spreading glass beads over Arctic ice, or iron fertilization of oceans, to name a few — and how their risksg et calculated. They highlight the “white male effect,” a well-documented phenomenon of white men showing significantly less aversion to perceived risk than any other demographic group. Indeed, the Spice scientists were overwhelmingly white and male — a trend that continues among researchers in geoengineering today. Given geoengineering’s potential to disrupt the natural systems that all life depends on, skewed attitudes toward risk could have globe-spanning significance.

Read the full article about the lack of diversity in geoengineering research by Sarah Sax at Grist.