Professor Inés Camilloni, who leads the Degrees Modelling Fund’s research project at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, appealed for more research into the potential drawbacks and benefits of SRM in her TEDxRiodelaPlata talk: Geoingeniería solar:¿quién controla el termostato de la Tierra? (Solar geoengineering: who controls the Earth’s thermostat?).
She explained why stratospheric aerosol injection was being considered to reduce the global temperature, but also raised some of the big governance issues surrounding any decisions to deploy it – including the potential for either positive or negative impacts on different parts of the world. She also made the case for a “risk/risk” analysis of SRM, where the significant risk of SRM are not evaluated in isolation, but in comparison to the risks of a warmed world without SRM.
“Do we have the right to intervene in the climate? Who decides whether we use geoengineering or not?” she asked. “Geoengineering is not just an environmental question, but also includes political, economic and social questions. We need to know the risks which geoengineering would bring, and compare them with the risks brought by climate change.”
Prof Camilloni is an experienced climatologist but she only started researching SRM when she received a DMF (then DECIMALS) grant from the Degrees Initiative in 2018. Since then she has emerged as a leading voice on SRM in Latin America and beyond.
Her work focuses on the impacts of SRM on the La Plata Basin’s hydroclimate, which is a crucial source of freshwater for more than 160 million people. Earlier this year she was among an international group of distinguished academics making the call for SRM to be evaluated through a risk/risk lens: https://www.c2g2.net/wp-content/uploads/202203-C2G-RR-Full.pdf