2025 Annual Update
The Planetary Sunshade Foundation, established seven years ago, has made significant progress in advancing the world’s understanding of space based sunlight reflection as an option to mitigate global temperature.
We have had our biggest year yet, by far.
Watch the recording of our annual update zoom call, or see some highlights below:
We organize the world’s experts on space based sunlight reflection, we communicate to the public and decision makers on our current understanding, and we focus research on the biggest unknowns.
“Could the world build a planetary sunshade,” and that is not complete until the answer is ‘no’, or the answer is ‘yes’, and ‘yes’ means an executable decision in political hands.”
Ross opened the call with a review of the Earths’ temperature, outlining the ‘napkin diagram’ of possible future secenarios.
“We are building up space-based sunlight reflection as a compliment to atmospheric reflection.”
Morgan discussed the recent grant received from the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which is funding a 12-month project to advance aerospace and climate modeling for the sunshade concept. The team is collaborating with Cornell University, Ethos Space, NASA's JPL, and the University of Nottingham, and other researchers to study different sunshade architectures and compare climate models.
Jeff Overbeek, Technical Director, presented an overview of the ARIA baseline survey project, focusing on the six different engineering architectures which are representative of ideas in the field. Each is sized to achieve a 1-degree Kelvin temperature reduction. The project aims to create a common language and interface between engineering and climate modeling to enable apples-to-apples comparisons of different sunshade architectures, including a reflective spacecraft, diffractive materials, wavelength-selective metamaterials, and a dust cloud concept.
Jeff gave us a preview of recent work on a heliogyro ‘sunflower’ design.
In describing the motivation for our research, Jeff said:
“Who are the people who are going to make decisions on climate interventions, and how can we help them by giving them what they need to know. Such as,, what are the ideal SRM interventions, and from space, what are our capabilities to deliver them.”
Morgan shared the status of this year’s fundraising efforts, our best ever. We are grateful to all those who have contributed to get the field this far. Please make your 2025 contribution now:
“We’ve taken a significant step forward this year in organizing the field of research.”
We have been busy! This slide shows the conference and events at which we have presented in 2025 (and we’re not done yet!) When we speak with climate researchers, we emphasize the current capabilities of the space sector, and when we speak with the space community we emphasize the importance of working on climate change and how to do that collaboratively with the field.
“It has been a very busy year.”
In the year ahead, see if it makes sense to join us at major international events that we plan to participate in.
We will be posting and sending information soon regarding the IAA Sunshade Workshop that we are organizing at the University of Nottingham in May, and the special issue we are working on assembling.
Please signup for our monthly email newsletter at planetarysunshade.org to be the first to know.
Help us chart the course for the years ahead. We want to hear from you!