“The world isn’t doing terribly well in averting global ecological collapse,” says Dr Florian Rabitz, a chief researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania, the author of a new monograph Transformative Novel Technologies and Global Environmental Governance recently published by Cambridge University Press.
Greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, chemical pollution, and more are threatening the Earth’s future. Despite decades of international agreements and countless high-level summits, success in forestalling this existential crisis has remained elusive, says Dr Rabitz.
In his new monograph, the KTU researcher delves into the intersection of cutting-edge technological solutions and the global environmental crisis. The author explores how international institutions respond (or fail to respond) to high-impact technologies that have been the subject of extensive debate and controversy.
Biotechnology to fight biodiversity loss
For example, one of the chapters in the monograph focuses on the broader field of biotechnology, and the potential role of novel biotechnologies in nature conservation. The ongoing biodiversity loss, provoked by invasive alien species (non-native organisms, disrupting the ecosystems into which they have been introduced due to human activities) is one of the characteristics of the current planetary crisis. The world’s leading scientific and policy organisations have been grappling with the urgent need to address this issue.
“The UN acknowledges that target 15.8 of the Sustainable Development Goals, aiming to prevent and significantly reduce the impact of biological invasions on land- and water ecosystems by 2020, has so far not been reached,” says Dr Rabitz.
He goes on to explain that scientists are currently exploring a variety of biotechnological countermeasures, including so-called gene drive systems that might effectively counteract invasive alien species through rapid and ecosystem-wide genetic engineering.
However, the use of these technologies introduces unprecedented risks and challenges that demand careful consideration and international collaboration. Gene drive systems, in particular, have become the subject of intense political scrutiny on the global stage, engaging institutions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Health Organization.
The problem with novel technologies is their unprecedented nature
Dr Rabitz believes that transformative novel technologies, such as those currently under consideration for combatting climate change through large-scale manipulation of planetary reflectivity, require adequate governance solutions to reap their potential benefits or to reduce their potential harm. Yet, these solutions are unreachable so far.
“We might well disagree on what precisely should be done with these and other types of transformative novel technologies – for instance, whether to restrict them, to ban them or to facilitate their responsible development and use. But in one way or another, the absence of appropriate international solutions for a wide range of momentous, contemporary technological developments is bound to create problems sooner or later,” says Dr Rabitz.
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Florian Rabitz’s monograph Transformative Novel Technologies and Global Environmental Governance was published by Cambridge University Press and is available here.
On Thursday, November 23 at 16:00, the author and the KTU Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities invite to the open lecture “Technological fixes for the global environmental crisis?”, where Dr Rabitz will introduce his book and discuss the issues described above. The lecture is free and open to the public.
