The Degrees Initiative was launched in 2010 as the SRM Governance Initiative (SRMGI), a response to the Royal Society’s seminal Geoengineering the Climate report and partnership between Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Royal Society, and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).
The 2010-2011 Working Group
SRMGI was originally imagined as a year-long project that would produce recommendations on the governance of SRM. It convened an international working group of 28 academics and NGO representatives from 16 different countries to draft a report. The group’s inputs and discussions at the 2011 SRMGI conference in the UK, provided the intellectual foundation for the 2011 SRMGI report. Early in the group’s deliberations it was decided that specific governance recommendations would be premature. Therefore, the SRMGI report instead sought to provide a foundation for further discussions, outlining different governance considerations and possibilities.
The members of the 2011 working group were (with their affiliations at the time):
| Name | Affiliation | Nationality |
| Prof. Vicente Barros | University of Buenos Aires | Argentina |
| Dr Jason Blackstock | Centre for International Governance Innovations | Canada |
| Prof. Ken Caldeira | Stanford University | USA |
| Prof. Paul Crutzen | Max Planck Institute, Mainz | The Netherlands |
| Dr Arunabha Ghosh | Council on Energy, Environment and Water | India |
| Prof. Clive Hamilton | Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics | Australia |
| Prof. David Keith | University of Calgary | Canada/USA |
| Prof. Peter Liss, FRS | University of East Anglia | UK |
| Dr Jane Long | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | USA |
| Prof. Igor Mokhov | AM Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics | Russia |
| Prof. Granger Morgan | Carnegie Mellon University | USA |
| Dr Sospeter Muhongo | University of Dar es Salaam | Tanzania |
| Prof. Laban Ogallo | Drought Monitoring Centre, Nairobi | Kenya |
| Prof. Ted Parson | University of Michigan | Canada |
| Dr Atiq Rahman | Centre for Advanced Studies | Bangladesh |
| Prof. Phil Rasch | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | USA |
| Prof. Steve Rayner | University of Oxford | UK/USA |
| Prof. Catherine Redgwell | University College London | UK |
| Prof. Alan Robock | Rutgers University | USA |
| Dr David Santillo | Greenpeace | UK |
| Dr Youba Sokona | African Climate Policy Centre | Ethiopia |
| Dr Pablo Suarez | Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre | Argentina |
| Dr Akimasa Sumi | University of Tokyo | Japan |
| Sen. Liz Thompson | Barbadian Senate, Rio+20 | Barbados |
| Prof. Eduardo Viola | University of Brasilia | Brazil |
| Prof. David Winickoff | University of California, Berkeley | USA |
| Prof. Xue Lan | Tsinghua University | PR China |
The birth of our outreach meetings
Once the report was published, with the support of the co-chairs, Andy Parker shifted SRMGI’s focus to the Global South. SRMGI began to work to internationalise the discussion, initially running SRM outreach meetings with local partner organisations in India, Pakistan and China. This was followed by a trio of meetings around Africa funded by the Inter-Academy Panel and delivered in partnership with the African Academy of Sciences. The model for our outreach workshops was established. They always have the same goals: to start well-informed conversations about SRM in the local climate community and to get participant ideas on any next steps in their countries or regions.
Expansion
In 2015, a grant from Open Philanthropy allowed for a significant expansion of outreach activities, with workshops across the world’s developing regions. A further grant in 2017 allowed for the launch of the Degrees Modelling Fund (formerly DECIMALS), the world’s first SRM research fund aimed exclusively at the Global South. Since then, the DMF has profoundly changed the demographic of the field and Degrees has awarded over $1.8 million in research and travel grants for southern scientists. In 2021, Degrees became a non-profit organization in the UK, giving it the foundation it needs to build on its proven model.