Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol Climate Intervention Implications for Global Agriculture—Thesis

[Geoengineering News]

https://www.proquest.com/openview/b1e343d8c5e6623d7ef9ea628b633f85/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Author

Brendan James Clark

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, School of Graduate Studies, 2025

Abstract

As the severity of climate change and its associated impacts continue to worsen, schemes for artificially cooling surface temperatures via planetary albedo modification are being studied. The method with the most attention in the literature is stratospheric sulfate aerosol climate intervention (SAI). Placing reflective aerosols in the stratosphere would have profound impacts on the entire Earth system, with potentially far-reaching societal impacts. This intervention strategy would impact crop production differently in different nations and would depend on the temperature target chosen. In this work, impacts on national maize, rice, soybean and wheat production were analyzed by looking at output from 11 different SAI scenarios carried out with a fully coupled Earth system model integrated with a crop model. Higher-latitude nations tend to produce the most calories under unabated climate change, while midlatitude nations maximize calories under moderate SAI implementation and equatorial nations produce the most calories from crops under high levels of SAI.

Source: ProQuest