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Solar Geoengineering Governance: A Fragmented Institutional Landscape Covering Multi-Dimensional Impacts
Authors: Dana Ruddigkeit, Heleen Bruggink and Aarti Gupta
Synopsis: This article challenges the common view that solar geoengineering lacks legal governance. Using a multi-dimensional impact approach, it shows that many potential harms of SRM already fall under existing international institutions and obligations. While no unified regime exists, this fragmented framework provides partial but restrictive coverage, limiting harmful impacts. Future SRM governance must build on, not override, these obligations, stressing coordination and precaution.
Enhancing Volcanic Eruption Simulations with the WRF-Chem v4.8
Authors: Alexander Ukhov, Georgiy Stenchikov, Jordan Schnell, Ravan Ahmadov, Umberto Rizza, Georg Grell, and Ibrahim Hoteit
Synopsis: Volcanic eruptions impact climate, ecosystems, health, and aviation through ash, SO₂, and sulfate emissions. This study enhances WRF-Chem v4.8 with improved deposition, SO₂ chemistry, and radiative effects. A new Python tool, PrepEmisSources, streamlines emission inputs. Results show better simulation of ash and aerosols, aiding forecasting, risk assessment, and applications in climate studies and geoengineering, including stratospheric aerosol injection.
Climate engineering in The Ministry for the Future and Termination Shock
Authors: Matt Morgenstern
Synopsis: This essay examines how climate engineering is represented in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. Both novels depict near-future climate crises, exploring geoengineering’s promises, risks, and the labor systems enabling its implementation. By foregrounding workers’ roles and experiences, the texts reframe climate fiction’s political dimensions, highlighting how climate labor underpins the viability and justice of climate engineering projects.
Divergent impacts of climate interventions on China’s north-south water divide
Authors: Xiao Zhang, Yuanchao Fan, Jerry Tjiputra, Helene Muri & Qiao Chen
Synopsis: This study examines how SRM affects China’s North Drought–South Flood pattern using the Norwegian Earth System Model and volcanic data. Results show equatorial SAI could ease the north-south water divide by altering temperature gradients and monsoon circulation, boosting rainfall in northern China while reducing it in the south, consistent with post-Pinatubo observations. By contrast, marine cloud brightening may worsen southern floods, while cirrus thinning and moderate emissions cuts could intensify northern drought. Findings underscore region-specific trade-offs between SRM’s global cooling potential and local water security.
Effervescent nozzle design to enable outdoor marine cloud brightening experimentation
Authors: Luke P. Harrison, Chris Medcraft, and Daniel P. Harrison
Synopsis: MCB aims to cool the planet by increasing cloud reflectivity with artificial sea spray aerosols (SSA). A single station must generate ~10¹⁵ CCN/s, but current limits have hindered tests. This study demonstrates an effervescent nozzle producing ~1.7×10¹² SSA/s (71% CCN-sized) at ~512 W. Scaling to 814 nozzles (~417 kW) meets requirements, making ship-based outdoor experiments feasible and enabling direct testing of cloud and radiative responses.
Solar Geoengineering Likely up to 14 Times More Efficient than CDR: Albedo Misrepresentations in Climate Forcing and Governance - Preprint
Authors: Alec Feinberg
Synopsis: This study presents a steady-state Unsaturated Linear Forcing (ULF) model, which assumes equal forcing potential for each added GHG unit. Unlike IPCC’s logarithmic formulas, ULF yields ~39% lower total forcing estimates for 1750–2019 and ~11% lower for CO₂ doubling, revealing diagnostic gaps. The model shows solar geoengineering (SG) is ~12–14× more efficient than CDR, with Earth responding more strongly to albedo than GHG changes. It identifies a global albedo crisis, driven by declining planetary reflectivity and urban darkening, and recommends a sustained annual SG strategy (surface brightening, sunshades, SAI), especially in polar regions, as a high-leverage mitigation path.
Schematic diagram showing the mechanisms of SAI in adjusting the North Drought-South Flood conditions over China (Source)
Identifying Drivers of the Acceptance and Rejection of Geoengineering: A Meta-Analysis
Authors: Jager, P.B. de
Synopsis: This thesis conducts a meta-analysis of 40 studies (2015–2024) on public acceptance of geoengineering, covering both SRM and CDR. Using 310 effect estimates, it identifies key drivers across five areas: performance expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, and demographics. Findings show acceptance depends less on technical feasibility and more on emotional, ethical, and informational factors. Trust, climate concern, and positive framing boost support, while ethical worries and limited familiarity reduce it. The study highlights that legitimacy requires transparency, inclusivity, and social engagement, not just technical advances.
The Science of Climate Engineering: Risks and Benefits
Authors: G Mwende Wairimu
Synopsis: This thesis explores climate engineering, tracing its history, technologies, benefits, and risks. It distinguishes between SRM, offering fast but risky cooling, and CDR, safer yet slower and costlier. Beyond science, it highlights governance, ethics, and public perception as key challenges. The study calls for transparent research, strong regulation, and global cooperation to ensure any future use of geoengineering aligns with safety, equity, and sustainability.
Conditions Leading to Extrinsic and Intrinsic Ecosystem Change Across Large Ensembles of Climate Futures
Authors: Daniel M Hueholt
Synopsis: This dissertation explores how ecosystems respond to both external climate drivers (“extrinsic change”) and shifts in internal dynamics (“intrinsic change”). While direct ecological simulations are limited, Earth system models can capture the regional climate conditions underlying ecosystem change. Using large ensembles of climate futures—including anthropogenic warming and stratospheric aerosol injection scenarios, the study investigates how these extrinsic and intrinsic factors interact, offering insights into ecological impacts under forced and managed climate change.
Solar Geoengineering Updates - Monthly Solar Geoengineering Updates (August'2025)
Science - Could a giant dam save the Atlantic currents that keep Europe warm?
Sifter - Dimming the sun, refreezing the ice: VCs flirt with geoengineering
Research Money - Canada needs research to inform policy-making on deploying solar geoengineering to reduce global warming
Science Focus - These are science’s boldest ideas to cool our heating planet
Planetary Sunshade - United Nations: Official Report on Capping Climate Change from Space
Research Associate or Assistant in Simulating Stratospheric Plumes at Imperial College London | Deadline: 02 October 2025
"Emissions plumes from high-altitude sources (e.g. aircraft) can persist for weeks or even months in the stratosphere, but most global atmospheric models are unable to preserve such fine structure over long periods. This calls into question the accuracy of simulations aimed at understanding the effects of aviation, launch vehicles, stratospheric convective injections, or – potentially - stratospheric geoengineering. We seek to develop a novel representation of stratospheric plumes which allows them to be accurately represented at global scales, and thereby inform efforts to understand potential risks and efficacy of stratospheric aerosol injection."
Should We Change Our Planet's Climate...On Purpose? | Entanglements by Undark
"This week on Entanglements: Should we run outdoor geoengineering experiments? Our hosts dive into this fiercely debated topic with an atmospheric chemist from Harvard University and a planetary physicist from Oxford University."
Engineering the Planet | BBC Rare Earth
Efforts to reduce our carbon emissions are falling far short of what’s necessary to keep our temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade. Is it time to seriously consider another option- using technology to cool the planet? Tom Heap and Helen Czerski explore the controversial field of geoengineering.
They're joined by Shaun Fitzgerald, Director of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University, Peter Brannen, author of The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything and by Alex Davey, Deputy Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh.
Geoengineering, nuclear, power prices, and more | Catalyst with Shayle Kann
"This episode covers topics like:
-Whether solar radiation management will remain the “black sheep” of climate technologies
-What technologies will excel in a world of rising power prices
-Whether the nuclear renaissance is finally here
-Why Lara and Shayle are more bullish on vehicle-to-home than V2G
-The thorny plastics problem – and whether it’s core to climate change"
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Climate Intervention and Role of Civil society | Operaatio Arktis | Healthy Climate Initiative
"As the climate crisis accelerates, scientific communities and civil society alike are beginning to engage with bold, and sometimes controversial, climate intervention strategies. Join us for an insightful webinar exploring Climate Intervention Research and the Role of Civil Society, featuring two leading voices from Finland’s pioneering youth-led climate strategy agency, Operaatio Arktis."
MEERtalk September 2025 - Mike Tidwell | MEER SRM
"Mike Tidwell has spent nearly 25 years as a grassroots climate activist, pushing for clean energy solutions to global warming in the Mid Atlantic region and on Capitol Hill. But the stubbornly slow conversion to renewable energy, combined with alarming new spikes in global temperatures, have convinced him that light reflection methods must be studied and tested across the planet. Tidwell's new book, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue, chronicles his conversion from mainstream activist to solar reflection "curious" as he watched the dramatic impacts of climate change descend on his one street in Maryland over the past few years."
Restoring a Healthy Climate: Nature Inspired Interventions to Reduce Global Warming and Restore Hope | Healthy Climate Initiative
"Our distinguished panel will explore the scope of the climate emergency, the most promising nature-inspired interventions, and what must be done to build political will and public understanding. Special attention will be given to the roles of the United States and India—representing both the Global North and Global South—in advancing practical solutions for a livable future."
09-10 September | Online - Multi-stakeholder Workshop on Solar Radiation Modification by UNEP
21-28 September | New York - Climate Week NYC by Climate Group
23 September | NYC, United States - The state of SRM impacts science and the need for responsible research by EDF at Climate Week NYC
24 September 2025 | New York - Solar Geoengineering Research: Next Steps for Civil Society by DSG CCAN
30 September | Belgium - Grappling with accelerating climate risks - Is it time to explore research into Solar Radiation Modification? by Euractive
6 – 9 October | Online - Virtual workshop series on Stratospheric Aerosol Injection
09 October | United States - Geoengineering, Global Warming & Sunlight Reflection Methods by Manny's (NEW)
17 October - Introducing SkyScroll by Planetary Sunshade Foundation
21-22 October | Helsinki, Finland - Workshop: The Future of climate intervention research - an early career gathering by Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering
23 October | Helsinki - ATLAS25: Risk Management of Earth System Tipping Points by Operaatio Arktis
3-7 November | Pune, India - 11th WMO Scientific Conference on Weather Modification
15-19 December | New Orleans, Louisiana - 2025 American Geophysical Union Meeting
9-13 March 2026 | Kyoto, Japan - CMIP Community Workshop (CMIP26)
21-26 June 2026 | United States - Gordon Research Conference - Bridging Observations, Models, and Impacts in Solar Radiation Modification Research
Solar Geoengineering Events Calendar
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