The Degrees Initiative announces a doubling of SRM research in the Global South
Andy Parker
Hi folks,
For the past 18 months the Degrees Initiative has been pretty quiet on here while we were working behind the scenes to transform from a virtual project to an independent NGO. We’re now ramping up our programmatic and comms work again, starting with an exciting announcement of a new cohort of Global South SRM research teams - see below.
First, for those of you who don’t know us, the Degrees Initiative is an NGO that seeks to build the capacity of developing countries to evaluate SRM. We are impartial on whether SRM should ever be used and how it should be governed, but we believe that the climate-vulnerable countries of the Global South should play a central role in research, discussion and decision-making.
We have been working for 12 years and for most of this time we were known as the SRM Governance Initiative or SRMGI. We have run more than 25 engagement workshops in the Global South. Through the Degrees Modelling Fund (DMF, formerly the DECIMALS Fund), we support teams of scientists in developing countries who want to explore how SRM could affect the climate in their regions. The DMF is run as a partnership between the Degrees Initiative and TWAS, and many of the world’s leading SRM modellers volunteer their time as research collaborators for the DMF because they believe in its capacity-building mission.
Through the first DMF call for proposals in 2018, Degrees supported 11 SRM modelling teams, including the first SRM research projects in:
South America
The Caribbean
Africa
The Middle East
Southeast Asia
Small Island Developing States
Least Developed Countries
Scientists from the 2018 grant round have been changing the face of SRM research—presenting their findings at international conferences, contributing to reports on SRM, and even giving TED Talks about it.
Fifteen new SRM research teams in the Global South
Today we are announcing 15 new DMF research teams across Africa, Asia and South America, which more than doubles the number of Southern research teams that are exploring SRM. The new teams are based in Benin, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa (x2), Thailand, and Uganda. So to date the DMF has supported 26 modelling projects in 21 different countries, involving over 150 scientists. This makes the Degrees Modelling Fund the largest SRM research initiative in the world.
The impact of the DMF. In blue are the countries with SRM research projects before 2018. In orange, countries in the Global South where new research projects have been funded through the DMF since 2018.
As ever with DMF grants, the new research teams were free to define their own research questions and funding selections were based on independent peer review. The new projects will now begin their research to better understand how SRM could affect, among other things, water stress in Central Africa, the retreat of Andean glaciers, or species loss amongst land-based mammals. Go check out their project pages, there are some really interesting new studies in there.
We’ll be posting more regular updates from now on, but if you want to stay in touch with our work, we’re on Twitter (@DegreesNGO) and LinkedIn, and you can sign up to our newsletter.
Andy
Founder and CEO - The Degrees Initiative