Funding for ‘scientifically feasible’ climate cooling initiatives

Exploring Climate Cooling aims to gather critical missing data to better understand potential approaches and their impacts.

The knowledge gap between a climate tipping point and our understanding of what to do if that happens has increased interest in approaches that actively reduce temperatures globally in a shorter timescale.

The £56.8mln, publicly funded initiative, by the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), will explore multiple approaches and help set the standard for responsible and inclusive research.

Programme Director, Mark Symes, says the initiative ‘will explore critical unanswered questions as to the feasibility, scalability and safety of some of these proposed approaches’.

The ARIA website makes it clear the programme will not fund and doesn’t support the deployment of any climate cooling approaches.

All funded research must comply with the following governance principles:

• Deliver valuable and transformational knowledge
• Minimise risk
• Engage with and respect key communities.
• Communicate proactively and be transparent, open, and honest at both the programme and project level, including around levels and sources of funding, intentions, how the research is conducted, outputs and impacts.
• Be cognisant of the broader implications of research and integrate systems thinking into research.
• Learn, adapt and be responsive.

The 21 funded research teams merge specialists across many disciplines and have been split into four topics:

1. Governance and ethics
2. Modelling
3. Outdoor monitoring
4. Controlled, small-scale outdoor experiments

The Oversight Committee, composed of international experts, will focus on:

• Supporting effective oversight of the programme's outdoor experiments and guiding transparent communication of findings.
• Shaping international norms and standards for the responsible governance of such experiments.
• Contributing constructively to the wider international discussion on potential governance mechanisms for climate cooling approaches.

The programme thesis can be read on ARIA’s website.