ARIA Grant Funding Award
The Planetary Sunshade Foundation is excited and honored to be part of ARIA's "Exploring Climate Cooling" funding program.
Our team has been awarded: £400k over 15 months to work with Ethos Space, Cornell University, National Center for Atmospheric Research, University of Nottingham, Redwire Space, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Our study brings together leading space engineering teams with expert climate modelers to address a critical knowledge gap. This team will model six different conceptual designs for space reflector approaches and then use climate models to simulate their potential climate impacts (including atmospheric dynamics, chemistry, and ocean/ice feedbacks). The goal is not to deploy this technology, but to provide an initial assessment of which concepts might warrant further study based on their modeled efficiency, scalability, and potential side effects, fostering collaboration between the space engineering and climate modeling communities.
Rising global temperatures increase the likelihood of crossing climate tipping points – abrupt and potentially irreversible shifts in the Earth’s climate system. While decarbonization is the only sustainable way to reduce the risk of these events in the long term, our current warming trajectory already makes a number of tipping points distinctly possible over the next century.
This situation has led to growing international interest in approaches to actively reduce global temperatures in the short term. However, we currently have little understanding of whether such interventions are scientifically feasible, and what their full range of impacts might be.
The 21 projects funded by ARIA's Exploring Climate Cooling program are designed to gather critical missing scientific data to better understand potential Earth cooling approaches and their impacts. The teams unite specialists across diverse disciplines – from atmospheric physics, chemistry, and climate modelling to chemical engineering, systems analysis, oceanography, and radiative transfer, alongside crucial expertise in governance and ethics.
This group shares a deep commitment to objective research conducted transparently and responsibly, aiming to navigate the complex ethical dimensions and establish best practices within this field.
Discover the projects, and learn more about ARIA's approach to governance in this program:
https://www.aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/future-proofing-our-climate-and-weather/exploring-climate-cooling