This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering
This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering
摘要: Climate change and energy
This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering
A new report from the nonprofit Reflective lays
正文
Climate change and energy
This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering
A new report from the nonprofit Reflective lays out the experiments needed to better understand our ability to dim the sun.
James Temple
archive page
September 10, 2026
Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Adobe Stock
A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering,
MIT Technology Review
can reveal.
Scientists have now spent
half a century
exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.
But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.
Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its
SAI Research Roadmap
.
“Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter,” says Dakota Gruener, the organization’s cofounder and chief executive. “Our sense is the world may need to make very consequential decisions on timelines far shorter than our research system is prepared for.”
The hope is the exercise will guide scientific efforts and encourage philanthropies or government agencies to fund high-priority work and “responsibly accelerate research,” says Gruener.
If all the work is done in a coordinated way, it would take about a decade and cost around $370 million—and if it’s not, it would require roughly 20 years and nearly $1.4 billion, the report estimates.
While Gruen