A realm in need of regulation
August 25, 2026 | 10 min. read
Canada’s legal framework doesn’t currently capture marine geoengineering. As experiments forge ahead, that must change.
By Holly Lake
The ocean is the world’s most significant carbon sink, acting as a critical buffer against the impacts of climate change.
It absorbs about 25 per cent of the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere, which amounts to nearly 3 billion tons each year.
However, as the climate crisis accelerates, people are increasingly looking to the ocean to do more. They believe there are solutions to be found by ‘geoengineering’ marine ecosystems. Marine geoengineering is defined by the International Maritime Organization as “a deliberate intervention in the marine environment to manipulate natural processes, including to counteract anthropogenic climate change and/or its impacts, and that has the potential to result in deleterious effects, especially where those effects may be widespread, long-lasting or severe”.
Around the world, experiments are already being developed or underway to remove carbon from the atmosphere through ocean fertilization, biomass sinking, ocean pumping, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and seabed carbon sequestration.
A second category of techniques aims to reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface through solar radiation management. These include marine cloud brightening to make them more reflective and ocean albedo enhancement to increase the reflectivity of the ocean’s surface.
‘A really big Tums’
Here in Canada, perhaps the most advanced and well-known experiment is being conducted by Dartmouth-based Planetary Technologies. Their alkalinity enhancement effort aims to increase the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide instead of it being absorbed in the atmosphere.
In plain speak, the team involved is adding more alkaline material to the ocean, similar to someone taking an antacid to deal with their acid reflux.
“It’s going to be a really big Tums,” one researcher involved told CBC.
Working with researchers from Dalhousie University, the group began dosing in Halifax Harbour in September 2023. It uses magnesium hydroxide derived from mine tailings, which are discharged into the ocean through existing marine outfalls, including pipelines and those used to discharge waste. Despite the project still falling within the field trial stage, Planetary Technologies is already selling carbon offsets from its Halifax site.
On West coast, the University of Victoria and Ocean Networks Canada’s Solid Carbon research project is looking to store carbon dioxide in the sub-seafloor. The team is focused on ocean basalt, which is found all over the world and reacts with carbon dioxide to mineralize.
For the last nine years, the team has conducted feasibility studies, modelling and lab experiments at a site 200 kilometres offshore from Vancouver Island. In March 2025, the project received $24 million in funding over six years through the federal government’s New Frontiers in Research Fund.
Notably, one site being considered for a Solid Carbon demonstration falls within the Tang.ɢ̱wan – ḥačxwiqak – Tsig̱is Marine Protected Are, home to many rare species and ecosystems, including at least 47 seamounts. According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, more than 70 per cent of the country’s known seamounts and hydrothermal vents are found here.
Looking north, the Ocean Visions Network, a non-profit organization focused on research and collaboration with universities and institutions, is investigating potential pathways to slow sea ice loss in the Arctic, including surface albedo modification and controversial solar radiation modification.
In March 2025, Natural Resources Canada released an intentions paper on offshore seabed carbon dioxide storage and sought feedback on the potential development of a framework to regulate it.
A lacking legal framework
Despite using largely unproven technology, marine geoengineering projects are currently moving ahead with little to no regulatory oversight. Stephanie Hewson, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, says there’s no overarching law or policy framework in Canada governing them.
The projects do not qualify for a federal impact assessment under the Impact Assessment Act, as they do not fall under the legislation’s list of designated projects. In the case of Planetary Technologies, because the effluent is emitted from a land-based source, the trials are also not captured by the Canadian Environmental Protection Act’s disposal-at-sea provisions despite the materials landing in the ocean. While environmental oversight via the Fisheries Act applies to what happens in the ocean, these provisions can only be applied if sufficient monitoring and testing exist.
“Depending on project design, it is possible for for-profit companies to proceed in this space with very little regulatory oversight,” Hewson says.
“Our current regulatory framework was not designed with marine geoengineering in mind.”
The Ocean Visions Network is developing an environmental impact assessment framework for projects focused on marine carbon dioxide removal. While this is a much needed tool, it is worth noting that the network also funds and partners with industry to develop and advance ocean-based climate solutions and ultimately move them toward commercial scale, creating an inherent conflict of interest with any environmental assessment. Moreover, the tool is being developed to address carbon dioxide removal technologies, but does not specifically address the many other geoengineering experiments that are occurring.
Scientific evidence remains scarce
In addition to the grey area around whether something is straight research or has evolved into a commercial deployment, there also remains little opportunity for public participation and input with marine geoengineering projects in Canada.
That is concerning for several reasons.
First, all of these technologies are still experimental and it’s unclear if they’ll be effective at scale. Because the ocean environment is far too complex to recreate in a lab, the only way to determine efficacy in capturing carbon is in an ocean setting at a large scale.
However, effectiveness isn’t just a question of whether a new technology can capture and remove carbon from the atmosphere. The bigger question is whether it can operate at a low enough carbon debt to make a meaningful dent in reducing carbon emissions. That means accounting for energy and resource requirements required at every stage to run the operation — whether that’s the power needed for the electrochemical separation of alkaline materials from mining tailings or the fossil fuels powering the ships required to pump alkaline materials on a large scale at sea or to reach offshore sub-sea carbon capture sites. Each of these steps creates climate-warming emissions. For some of these technologies, those requirements continue indefinitely to ensure captured carbon continues to be stored.
Hewson says a technology that doesn’t capture much more than it’s producing is a false solution. She points to Climeworks, a carbon capture company in Iceland, as an example. In addition to capturing only a fraction of the carbon dioxide that it has promised to, it’s failing to offset even its own operational carbon footprint.
There is a real risk that the rush to develop this technology will distract from investment in proven climate mitigation solutions that address the root causes of climate change. A concentration of resources in geoengineering experiments diverts funds, capacities and technologies away from incentives to reduce emissions. Speculation on the effectiveness of this technology by large-scale emitters could be used to justify a failure to reduce harmful greenhouse gases, providing a loophole for “business as usual”.
Experimenting on the Earth’s lungs
In addition to being the world’s largest carbon sink, the ocean is also the planet’s lungs. It covers 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and generates 50 per cent of the oxygen we breathe, sustaining life as we know it.
Geoengineering is using the ocean as a laboratory to conduct experiments.
Given the ocean’s critical role in our survival and the current lack of scientific evidence supporting geoengineering techniques, this calls out for oversight and governance, as well as strict adherence to the precautionary principle, as urged by the marine and social scientists in a 2019 report.
The Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection, a body that advises the United Nations system on the scientific aspects of marine environmental protection, highlighted the need for sound scientific evidence for each approach, given the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment involved.
“For each and every technique, information on marine geoengineering approaches available in the permanent public record, and/or as peer-reviewed documents, is inadequate to permit a robust scientific assessment, much less one that can be readily intercompared with other approaches to climate intervention,” the report stated.
That evidence is critical for policymakers and regulators.
More harm than good?
And what about the unintended consequences? Computer modelling can only go so far in a realm with plenty of unpredictable risks. As researchers from MIT have noted, while ocean alkalinity enhancement may remove carbon from the atmosphere, it also has the potential to negatively impact ecosystem function, marine life, nutrient cycles and water chemistry.
“It’s crucial that this process not do more harm than good to human health or ocean life,” they explained.
Similar concerns exist for all marine geoengineering techniques, including sinking carbon-capturing algal biomass to the seafloor.
Scientists from around the world, including renowned Canadian marine biologist Thierry Chopin, have warned that “deep-ocean seaweed dumping is not an ecological, economical, or ethical answer to climate-change mitigation.”
“Without sound science and sufficient knowledge on impacts to these fragile ecosystems, it distracts from more rational and effective blue-carbon interventions,” they said in a 2024 commentary.
“We call for a moratorium on sinking seaweeds to deep-ocean ecosystems until its efficacy is established, and there is robust, evidence-based assessment of its environmental, economic, and societal sustainability.”
Given that research has consistently identified potential risks posed by solar radiation modification, scientists at James Cook University in Australia say trying to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back to space isn’t a bright idea.
“Human-caused climate change is already one planetary-scale experiment too many – we don’t need another.”
They point to its potential unpredictable effects on climate and weather patterns, biodiversity loss (particularly if use is abruptly halted), and the risk of creating food insecurity by reducing the light needed to grow crops.
“It is difficult to know what we are getting ourselves into unless we actually did the experiment on the whole planet,” Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate scientist who models impacts of solar geoengineering on crops at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told NPR.
Since 2022, nearly 600 scientists from 67 countries have signed an open letter calling for an international non-use agreement on solar geoengineering amid concerns that “the risks … are poorly understood and can never be fully known.” The letter says speculative hopes pinned on these technologies detract from the urgent need to cut global emissions and risks becoming a way for industry, climate denialists, and some governments to delay decarbonization efforts. Also, the current global governance system is unfit to effectively regulate their deployment.
The European Union has been clear that solar geoengineering is not a response to the climate crisis, as it doesn’t address the root cause.
“Even if technically feasible and proven safe, it would provide only a temporary relief, not a cure,” the European Commission’s Group of
Chief Scientific Advisors said in a paper, adding that in the current state of development, the technology is an unacceptable risk for humans and the environment.
Hewson says the ocean is a complex living system that we depend on for fish, food security, livelihoods, and marine life’s survival. When it comes to deploying marine geoengineering at the scale required to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gases, we just can’t predict what the impacts will be.
“We’ve seen time and again that when we affect one part of a living system, it can have cascading negative effects beyond our ability to predict or control,” she says.
“We are understandably desperate for solutions to the climate crisis, but we must ensure that we choose those with the greatest impact and proceed in a way that doesn’t risk causing greater harm.”
Feeding a framework
Effectively assessing and regulating these novel projects is key, starting with a strategic environmental assessment of marine geoengineering technologies under the Impact Assessment Act. Hewson says this would allow independent scientists to get involved and begin to address questions about the efficacy of these technologies, the potential risks and the opportunity costs related to other climate interventions, as well as the potential benefits.
At the same time, Canada must also develop mechanisms to govern geoengineering research projects. This research is necessary to make evidence-based policy decisions about these technologies, but it’s critical that there’s oversight. Establishing mechanisms for independent assessment, public participation, and drawing a clear line between legitimate scientific research and commercial deployment are key.
The information gleaned from a strategic environmental assessment and well-regulated research trials must feed into a robust regulatory framework for marine geoengineering.
International agreements and commitments must also inform this framework.
Canada is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and ratified it in November 2003. Article 195 sets out a duty not to transfer damage or hazards from one area to another or transform one type of pollution into another when trying to prevent, reduce or control marine pollution. Article 196 requires states to take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce, and control marine pollution from any source, particularly new technologies or activities that may cause significant and harmful changes to the marine environment.
In an advisory opinion last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea found that greenhouse gas emissions are a form of pollution under UNCLOS, so parties to the Convention have a legal obligation to address them.
It also addressed how states are to do that and said marine geoengineering “would be contrary to article 195 if it has the consequence of transforming one type of pollution into another.” (para. 231). It noted these techniques might also be subject to Article 196.
In addition to UNCLOS, Canada is a party to the London Protocol and was actively involved in its development. It exists to control marine pollution by prohibiting the disposal of wastes and other matter at sea. It effectively bans ocean fertilization through its heavy regulation. And while it permits legitimate scientific research around marine geoengineering, that does not extend to commercial deployment.
In 2023, parties to the Protocol announced their intention to regulate four additional marine geoengineering techniques — ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass cultivation and dumping, marine cloud brightening and surface albedo enhancement — given the “potential for deleterious effects that are widespread, long-lasting or severe.” Heavy regulation of these techniques could also effectively amount to a ban.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which Canada has ratified, also established a moratorium on ocean fertilization in 2008 and expanded to a de facto moratorium on all geoengineering in 2010. This was reaffirmed in 2024 at CBD COP16.
“We need to respect these moratoriums that Canada was part of developing,” Hewson says.
“We were part of those conversations and we agreed to those resolutions. So we need to take those frameworks and apply them in our own laws and regulatory framework.”
Canada could lead the formation of a new global geoengineering governance regime. Elizabeth Chalecki, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Nebraska Omaha and a Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, thinks this country is well-positioned to be out front on this.
In a piece that appeared in the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, she pointed to this country’s technological knowledge, its role as an internationally respected middle power, and its proximity to the Arctic as potential testing grounds.
“By stepping forward to lead the effort, Canada can ensure its own security and environmental interests as well as the stability of the rules-based international order,” she wrote.
As the climate crisis intensifies, the pressure to find solutions will grow. But can we as a society justify ignoring potential irreversible damage when so much is at stake? Can we risk the potentially devastating consequences of allowing these activities to continue without oversight, particularly when interests from big emitters is already part of the financing mix?
Canada has a real opportunity to show leadership in balancing innovation with responsible regulatory practice. Whether we are up for the challenge remains to be seen.