Experimental climate interventions in the world’s oceans are moving ahead in a regulatory vacuum, raising concerns among scientists about potential risks, Mongabay staff writer Edward Carver reported.

The projects, known as marine-climate interventions, aim to tackle global warming or help people and ocean life adapt to climate change. But a group of 24 researchers warned in a recent paper that these interventions risk causing unintended ecological harm and social conflict unless stronger rules are introduced at all levels of governance.

Raking in millions of dollars in investments, such interventions include farming large amounts of seaweed to sequester carbon; engineering corals with human-assisted evolution; fertilizing seawater with iron to stimulate plankton growth; and modifying clouds to reflect away more sunlight.

“As a group of interdisciplinary marine and climate scientists, we all started thinking, ‘hang on, what’s going on here?’” lead author Tiffany Morrison, a professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, Australia, told Carver. “This is actually problematic. The field is moving so fast.”

Demand for fast, large-scale climate solutions is rising, but many companies are skipping key steps such as consulting local communities and weighing long-term impacts, the paper’s authors say.

For example, a U.K. company that sells carbon credits added a magnesium-hydroxide slurry to treated wastewater flowing into St. Ives Bay in Cornwall. The intervention was expected to draw more carbon out of the atmosphere. The company, Planetary Tech, had regulatory approval, but it only consulted with the public after carrying out the intervention.

“In effect the company was gaining the benefits, through selling the carbon, while any unforeseen risks were borne by the locals — a new form of extractivism,” Neil Adger, one of the study co-authors and a geographer at the University of Exeter, U.K., told Mongabay in an email

The company later decided not to pursue the project “due to commercial infeasibility,” it said in a statement shared with Mongabay.

The study authors write that such projects are often narrow in focus and may solve one problem while causing other, larger consequences.

“What sort of harm are you willing to accept to the marine environment to have some temporary influence on climate change?” Kristina Gjerde, a senior high seas adviser to the Global Ocean Team at the IUCN, the global nature conservation authority, told Mongabay. She wasn’t involved with the study.

“This is exactly the type of debate that is too big for any commercial interest or even a scientific research interest,” Gjerde added, advocating for a global solution to a planetary problem.

Read the full story by Edward Carver here.

Banner image: Growing seaweed or kelp at scale is one of the proposed marine-climate interventions. Image courtesy of Nuno Vasco Rodrigues/Climate Visuals Countdown (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).