Degrees and partners have been awarded £2m by the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) to inform climate models across the Global South.
Five other projects funded by ARIA are led by researchers who came to SRM research through Degrees’ initial support.
People in the Global South are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and so potentially have the most to gain – or lose – from approaches to cooling the Earth. These approaches include solar radiation modification (SRM) – also known as solar geoengineering – which involves reflecting a small amount of sunlight away from the Earth.
These Earth cooling approaches are not a substitute for emissions cuts but are being researched as a possible way to rapidly reduce warming while cuts take effect. However, as they have potential side effects, any decisions on future deployment must consider impacts on all regions.
Degrees empowers researchers in the Global South to ask and answer their own questions about the impacts of SRM and climate change for their regions. The new funding will support this work by increasing access to high-quality local climate data.
The Global to Regional Impacts Downscaling for Climate Cooling (GRID-CC) project will create an open-access repository of detailed Global South climate data, hosted at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. It has been awarded £2m over three years.
This data will support more accurate models of the impacts of SRM to compare to those of climate change. Better and more accessible data will lead to inclusive, locally driven research across regions that can feed into policy processes.
The funding is awarded as part of ARIA’s Exploring Climate Cooling programme, designed to explore whether approaches designed to delay, or avert, climate tipping points could be feasible, scalable, and safe.
From data to impact
The first phase of the project will create a repository of SRM research data and research results. Then, it will take data from the latest climate prediction models and apply techniques to make it more useful to Southern regions.
Outputs of climate models are often quite ‘rough’ – dividing the world into 100 km2 or larger squares. To make these more useful for identifying more local impacts, the data needs to be ‘downscaled’ to smaller squares. This involves gathering historical weather data from a region – such as rainfall, temperature and humidity – and feeding it into a climate model so more accurate predictions can be made.
This is a labour- and data-intensive process, so creating a database of such data that is openly available to all will make SRM studies much easier.
To demonstrate the power of this database, the project will then undertake a global impact study led by researchers in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America. The focus of this is still to be decided, but the idea is to investigate a topic that is relevant to all regions, such as agriculture and food security, water security, extreme heat and heat exposure, health (climate-borne diseases and heat exposure) and biodiversity.
This work will engage directly with local experts to ensure the insights gained will help answer the most important questions for the community.
No part of the GRID-CC project involves any kind of physical or outdoor experiment. All studies are based on data and modelling alone. Note also that all projects are subject to final contract negotiation.
Project people
The core GRID-CC team is:
- Andy Parker, Principal Investigator, the Degrees Initiative
- Dr Chris Lennard, Work Package 1 Lead, University of Cape Town
- Prof. Babatunde Abiodun, Work Package 2 Lead, University of Cape Town
- Dr Daniele Visioni, Cornell University, downscaling supervisor
In addition to GRID-CC, five other projects funded by ARIA are led by researchers who are also funded by Degrees, and came to SRM research through our initial support. We are proud that researchers who we have supported have been able to go on and secure greater funding on their own. These are:
- Evidence-based Assessments to Guide Perceptions, Governance, and Ethical Frameworks for South Asia: Comparing Marine Cloud Brightening strategies vis-à-vis carbon dioxide removal and mitigation efforts
Lead: Athar Hussain, COMSATS University, Pakistan
Award: £574k over 3 years
- PULSE Project: Public Understanding, Leadership, and Social Ethics in the governance of earth cooling technologies in communities impacted by volcanic activity in the Philippine context
Lead: Lorena Sabino, University of the Philippines Los Baños
Award: £135k over 2 years
- Ethics and Governance of Earth Cooling Research: from concepts to implementation
Lead: Ignacio Mastroleo, National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina
Award: £453k over 2 years
- Investigating the Impacts of Earth Cooling Approaches on the Variability and Wet-Dry Spell Dynamics of the West African Monsoon
Lead: Amadou Coulibaly, Institut Polytechnique Rural de Formation et de Recherche Appliquée (IPR-IFRA), Mali
Award: £257k over 3 years
- Towards Robust and Unbiased validation of SAI Simulations (TRUSS)
Lead: Heri Kuswanto, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Indonesia
Award: £345k over 3 years
