Polar Cooperation Research Centre: 27th PCRC Public Seminar “Governing Glacial Geoengineering at the South Pole? The political and legal risks of ‘ice sheet conservation’ in Antarctica”

Polar Cooperation Research Centre (PCRC) at Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies will convene its 27th PCRC international law seminar entitled "Governing Glacial Geoengineering at the South Pole? The political and legal risks of ‘ice sheet conservation’ in Antarctica". The speaker is Dr. Patrick Florian Flamm, an international relations scholar from Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor under Kobe University Strategic International Collaboration Grant Type C project on “The Rule-based International Order after the Russian aggression of Ukraine: Multidisciplinary research”.

On current unmitigated emissions pathways, there is a growing chance of a collapsing critical glaciers of the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the most-at-risk planetary tipping points. Such a collapse will commit the world to several meters of mean global sea level rise over only a few centuries. In this context, there is a growing academic debate about the potential of supporting glacial stability through artificial infrastructures such as underwater curtains (see recent Nature article). This so-called "ice sheet conservation" would also come with significant yet unforeseeable technical and environmental risks though.

Largely missing so far is a critical discussion of the legal and political risks of how to govern such cryosphere interventions in the context of the Antarctic Treaty System. Inviting commentators from different disciplines, one Antarctic sea-ice specialist from Hokkaido University and one international law expert from Kobe University, this seminar leads off such a critical discussion based on a multi-disciplinary collaborative research approach.

For the details, please refer to the flyer.