Rewriting Humanity for a Dying Planet

As the climate crisis accelerates, the conversation is shifting from mitigation and prevention to adaptation and survival. Droughts intensify, coastlines recede, and billions face heat levels once deemed uninhabitable. Amid this rapidly changing planet, researchers are beginning to explore what were once unthinkable solutions: genetically-engineered humans, atmospheric manipulation, and biomechanical enhancements designed not to prevent catastrophe – but to endure it.

This transformation in focus from fixing the planet to fixing ourselves raises urgent ethical questions. Who gets to survive the climate future? At what cost to human dignity, autonomy, and justice? And who gets to decide?

As these technologies evolve, we stand at a crossroads. Do we want to reengineer humanity, or reimagine society?

From Sci-Fi to Science

The technologies under consideration are no longer just the fodder of speculative fiction. One proposal attracting renewed attention is solar radiation management injecting reflective particles like sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the Earth by mimicking the effects of a volcanic eruption. A 2023 Harvard-led initiative seeking to test this concept was halted after public backlash, yet the idea continues to surface in global climate discussions.

Meanwhile, biotech researchers are investigating genetic adaptations for human survival in extreme environments. A 2022 study by the University of Copenhagen identified gene variants linked to heat resilience in populations long exposed to high temperatures. Could these genetic traits be isolated, edited, or transferred to future generations?

A parallel effort is underway in agriculture, where scientists are genetically engineering crops to tolerate heat, salinity, and flooding. If plant genomes can be edited to survive climate extremes, might human genomes be next?

But these proposals raise a critical concern: will climate survival become a function of privilege, access, or genetic modification?

Autonomy and Bodily Integrity in the Age of Enhancement

Secular humanism places deep value on autonomy and bodily integrity. These principles clash with the idea of genetically altering human embryos or deploying population-wide enhancements in the name of climate adaptation.

Should children be genetically modified to breathe more efficiently in a high-CO₂ world? To sweat less in triple-digit temperatures? These aren’t abstract hypotheticals; several gene-editing companies are already exploring heritable edits for traits related to metabolism, endurance, and oxygen uptake. Supporters of enhancement argue that such tools are necessary – even moral – in the face of mounting environmental pressures. But others warn of coercion, especially if these “fixes” are marketed as necessary for one’s survival, employable future, or social inclusion. Bioethicist and legal scholar Professor Osagie K. Obasogie warns that the legacy of eugenics continues to shape how science and policy approach health and inequality. “There’s a legacy of eugenics,” he explains, “and that continued framing of these types of racial disparities and health being tied to the genetics or biology of race.” His research highlights how modern technological solutions to climate and health crises risk reinforcing old hierarchies under new guises. As climate adaptation strategies increasingly rely on biotech and genetic interventions, Obasogie’s work raises a critical question: who benefits from these innovations and who is quietly left behind?

The Inequity of Access: Whose Lives Are We Engineering?

Like many forms of innovation, climate survival technologies risk deepening global inequalities. Wealthy nations and individuals are more likely to access protective or enhancement technologies leaving the most vulnerable to suffer the consequences of a crisis they did the least to cause.

Geoengineering also reflects these inequities. While proponents argue it could buy the world time, critics say the technology could disproportionately harm equatorial regions through disrupted rainfall patterns, threatening agriculture and livelihoods in parts of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

“The people who benefit from geoengineering won’t be the ones living under its side effects,” says Kwame Obeng, an environmental sociologist based in Ghana. “This is the same colonial logic wrapped in new technology.”

Climate Tech vs. Climate Justice

The turn toward speculative techno-fixes diverts attention and funding from the basic infrastructure still lacking in many frontline communities. Climate adaptation should mean building seawalls, upgrading housing, improving health care, and ensuring water and food security. Yet much of the current investment in “climate resilience” is focused on high-tech solutions.

This shift represents a broader philosophical tension: do we solve the climate crisis through technological adaptation, or political transformation?

A 2023 analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative revealed that adaptation efforts aimed at helping communities cope with the effects of climate change received just 4% of total global climate finance. The rest, over 90%, was funneled into mitigation technologies like clean energy. This striking disparity highlights a growing concern: while wealthier regions invest in shielding themselves from climate disruptions, the world’s most vulnerable communities are left without the resources needed to adapt or recover.

The choice to fund speculative solutions over proven ones isn’t neutral; it reflects a value system that prizes innovation over justice, and markets over humanity.

When Adaptation Becomes Abandonment

The promise of technological adaptation often conceals a deeper failure: the quiet abandonment of collective responsibility. As wealthier societies invest in futuristic enhancements – genetic, atmospheric, architectural and otherwise – the global majority remains mired in the daily emergencies of survival. The question is no longer just how we adapt, but who gets to.

Consider the emerging market for private “climate-proof” enclaves. In the U.S., real estate developments in places like Utah and the Pacific Northwest are being marketed as climate refuges complete with water rights, air-filtration systems, and underground bunkers. In India, luxury developers advertise sealed high-rises that protect elites from Delhi’s toxic air, while across town, slum residents inhale the same smog without recourse. Technology here becomes a partition offering safety for the few while naturalizing danger for the many.

This vision of climate adaptation aligns disturbingly well with market logic: a future where survival is available for purchase, and where speculative solutions attract more investment than preventive care, clean energy, or democratic infrastructure.

In 2024, the biotech startup Genespire secured €46.6 million to advance GENE202, a gene therapy aimed at treating Methylmalonic Acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder. This therapy uses innovative Immune Shielded Lentiviral Vector (ISLV) technology to enable lifelong treatment for pediatric patients.

While groundbreaking, the development raises significant concerns about accessibility. These advancements are often available only to affluent populations, intensifying existing health inequities. As the world faces growing challenges like food scarcity and extreme climate conditions, relying solely on genetic solutions risks sidelining the most vulnerable. Addressing the root causes of inequality through policy changes and equitable resource distribution is crucial to ensure that the benefits of biotechnology reach all, not just the privileged few.

The Erasure of Frontline Voices

Another danger lies in who gets to define the problem and its solutions. Climate-vulnerable communities, particularly in the Global South and in Indigenous territories, have long practiced forms of resilience grounded in stewardship, reciprocity, and ecological knowledge. Yet these traditions are often ignored in favor of technological “fixes” developed in labs far removed from lived realities.

In the Amazon Basin, communities have resisted geoengineering experiments that could alter rainfall patterns critical to subsistence farming. In the Sahel, local leaders have warned that solar radiation management could interfere with monsoon cycles essential to agriculture. But these objections are rarely heard in climate tech boardrooms, where the emphasis remains on scalability, innovation, and investor return.

This epistemic injustice where some ways of knowing and being are rendered invisible undermines the very goals of adaptation. A solution that ignores the needs and voices of those most affected is no solution at all. Worse, it risks reproducing the same hierarchies that created the climate crisis in the first place.

Reimagining Resilience

The antidote to techno-elitism is not rejection of science, but recalibration. What if we defined resilience not as individual enhancement, but as community capacity? What if climate readiness meant public health systems, inclusive housing, debt relief, and climate reparations? What if we understood adaptation as an opportunity to remake the world more just, more democratic, more humane?

Some communities are already doing this. In Puerto Rico, grassroots solar cooperatives have emerged in the wake of Hurricane Maria, providing energy independence and community control. In Bangladesh, floating schools and hospitals navigate rising floodwaters while maintaining access to education and care. These are not the solutions that make headlines but they are the ones saving lives.

Infusing climate policy with humanist ethics means resisting fatalism and doubling down on collective care. It means treating the climate crisis not as a blank slate for technological ambition, but as a mirror reflecting our values, our failures, and our capacity for transformation.

What Kind of Humanity Do We Choose?

The most disturbing aspect of climate survival technology is not its ambition, but its implication: that we’ve already accepted failure. That we no longer believe in the collective capacity to reduce emissions, transform systems, and prevent collapse. That survival is not a shared goal but a privatized pursuit.

Yet humanism urges us to resist such fatalism. It challenges us to center human dignity, shared responsibility, and global solidarity.

This means asking hard questions about how technologies are designed, deployed, and governed. Who gets a say? Whose bodies and lives are considered worthy of preservation? And what vision of the future are we engineering not just biologically, but morally?

It also means rejecting the idea that adaptation and justice are mutually exclusive. We can invest in both technological solutions and grassroots resilience. We can push for innovation while upholding equity. We can choose to rewrite not just our genes, but the systems that brought us to this point.

Toward an Ethic of Collective Survival

There’s no denying the allure of climate survival technologies. In a world gripped by fear and ecological uncertainty, any promise of control can feel like hope. But we must distinguish between survival for some and justice for all.

A truly humanist response to climate change asks us to consider not just how we endure, but how we care. It asks us to prioritize universal access, consent, and shared benefit in every climate solution. It pushes us to think beyond the individual body, toward the body politic. This means foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems that understand land, people, and climate as interconnected. It means empowering the communities most affected to shape the tools meant to help them. And it means naming the systems economic, political, and colonial that got us here in the first place. As one climate justice organizer put it: “We don’t need to hack the planet. We need to heal it and each other.”

We are not powerless. The same ingenuity now being used to engineer heatproof crops or sun-reflecting aerosols can be redirected toward sustainable infrastructure, equitable energy transitions, and global cooperation. The same resources spent designing gene-edited humans could be spent safeguarding the humanity of all people, now and into the future.

Climate survival is not just a scientific project. It is a moral one. The decisions we make now will define not only who survives, but what values endure. We have a choice: to become a species that adapts through division and enhancement, or one that survives through solidarity and justice.

Let us choose wisely.