The United Nations warned that some efforts to address climate change can carry their own risks to the planet.
Those include carbon offsets and cloud-altering experiments, which the U.N. said in a new report could lead to financial corruption and destabilized weather patterns if they’re not fully understood and managed responsibly.
“The disruptions presented in this report are not guaranteed to happen. But they could happen. We need to be ready,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme, writes in the forward of the report.
It looks at eight major shifts globally, including the rapid development of technologies like artificial intelligence, forced displacement of people, competition for natural resources and the rise of misinformation. The report also points to geoengineering experiments such as solar radiation modification, and the use of carbon offsets as areas that could create more problems than solutions when addressing rising temperatures.
