The Global South Has SRM Experts – It’s Time to Listen to Them

We are fast approaching a 1.5°C world. The latest UNEP emissions gap report warns that without immediate and radical action on emissions cuts, that global warming target “will be dead within a few years”.

In this context, solar radiation modification (SRM) is rising up the international agenda, with major policy advisories, newspaper debates, and Google searches for “solar geoengineering” all rising steadily in recent years. But how international is this agenda? How will poor and climate-vulnerable countries ever be able to participate meaningfully in discussions about this complex and controversial emerging technology?

At this point there is a standard playbook for a commentary on SRM and developing countries. The writer notes that most research has taken place in the Global North, claims that developing countries are marginalised in the SRM debate, and calls for Southern countries be more involved in SRM research.

This narrative is well-intentioned and persuasive, but quite out of step with today’s reality.

Dozens of people have been working on “getting Southern countries involved” for more than a decade. Experts from low- and middle-income countries are now a mainstay of the SRM research community. They are modelling local impacts, running stakeholder engagements, informing policymakers, setting up research hubs, and giving TED talks. Some excellent initiatives have done important work engaging policymakers and stakeholders across the developing world.

The question is therefore how we build on the foundation of the Southern researchers’ leadership and expertise. Here, unsurprisingly, Southern experts have a few ideas of their own.

Getting serious about capacity-building

SRM is most important to climate-vulnerable low- and middle-income countries. If it works well to reduce climate risk, they have the most to gain. If it goes wrong, has damaging side effects, or is delayed or rejected when it could have helped, vulnerable countries have the most to lose. But in the early days of SRM research, there was indeed little Southern engagement.

I built the Degrees Initiative – in concert with an army of volunteers from every corner of the planet – to address this situation. Degrees is impartial on whether SRM should ever be used and instead seeks to change the environment in which SRM will be evaluated, ensuring that low- and middle-income countries will have their own experts and evidence to inform policymakers.

We pioneered SRM engagement across the Global South, and we have held more than 30 workshops in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. These meetings were invaluable for informing our theory of change, and we established strong connections with climate scientists across the Global South.

But we quickly learned that you do not build capacity through engagement workshops. Where SRM expertise has developed in either the Global North or South, it has largely come off the back of years of research. We soon recognised that if we were serious about supporting Southern experts, we needed to fund research.

In 2018, we launched the Degrees Modelling Fund, which is the world’s first SRM modelling fund aimed exclusively at low- and middle-income countries.

Our research teams have full academic freedom. We do not tell anyone what to research or which research methods to use. We also don’t pick the projects ourselves and research teams are chosen by an independent grants committee informed by independent peer review following an open call for proposals. Once the teams are chosen, we then pay researchers’ salaries, publication fees, conference participation fees, and computer costs. The researchers then publish great papers and take their place at the heart of the global SRM conversation.

Local research priorities

The Degrees Modelling Fund has changed the face of SRM. So far it has supported more than 170 researchers working across 28 projects in 22 low- and middle-income countries, resulting in nearly 40 peer-reviewed papers. These projects are asking locally relevant research questions about SRM and are filling the gaps in knowledge around what SRM and warming might mean for climate-vulnerable regions.

Let’s take Malaysia. Floods happen most rainy seasons, but recently climate change has led to more damaging storms becoming more frequent. Extreme precipitation from mid-December 2021 to early 2022 led to devastating flooding, killing more than 50 people, affecting 125,000 more, and resulting in financial losses of nearly US$1.5 billion.

To see if SRM could help reduce these impacts, a Degrees-funded team, led by Prof. Mou Leong Tan from Universiti Sains Malaysia, is investigating how SRM could affect temperature and rainfall extremes for several river basins across Malaysia.

Their results are varied, as you might expect. For some basins, SRM seems to reduce extreme rainfall compared to worst-case climate change, for others, rainfall also decreases in the dry seasons. Both of these results would have knock-on impacts on agriculture, water supply, industry, and the wellbeing of local populations.

While it is important to know how SRM might affect Malaysia, it is more important that it is Prof. Tan asking these questions. With home-grown expertise on the topic, Malaysia is better positioned to make its own mind up about SRM – whether ultimately for or against.

Degrees-funded researchers are ensuring that Southern expertise is at the heart of SRM evaluation. They lead sessions at prestigious conferences, co-author influential report chapters, and serve on high-level international working groups.

The human dimensions of SRM

A better understanding of temperatures and rainfall is important for good decisions on SRM, but it is not sufficient. Many people see the societal dimensions of SRM as the biggest challenge, and last year we launched the first research programme specifically to study the socio-political dimensions of SRM in the Global South.

The first nine projects of our Socio-Political Fund investigate the implications of SRM for other areas of society – from health justice across the developing world to economic risks and benefits for Latin America.

They also examine stakeholder perspectives. What does the public know about SRM? What are their views on research, ethics, and governance? We expect the first results from these studies over the next year.

Over the next few years, we aim to bring policymakers and researchers together more directly. This will show policymakers that there is diverse SRM expertise in their regions, and it will allow researchers to understand the climate issues that policymakers are most interested in. The relationships they build will be a useful starting point for informed science-policy dialogue.

On the horizon

It has been exciting to see Southern SRM researchers moving well beyond their initial Degrees research grants. Plans for an African SRM research hub are in the advanced stages of development, while in Mexico a team from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), led by Dr Graciela Raga, have created a virtual education course on SRM. Last year, Dr Romaric Odoulami from the University of Cape Town was awarded a major grant from the Simons Foundation to expand African SRM research.

These are some promising steps towards Degrees’ long-term vision – a world without Degrees. Once there are self-organising, well-funded SRM research communities across the world’s developing regions, with international collaboration the norm for SRM evaluation, we can declare mission accomplished and have a weekend off.

There’s still a way to go though, and we have ambitious upcoming plans. We are working to facilitate regional networks – for example helping grantees build research networks for Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-regions of Asia – which can share data and consolidate knowledge. We are supporting researchers who want to engage in policy processes and soon we will coordinate regional studies on the most important climate and SRM impacts.

Most immediately, and perhaps most exciting, is the largest and most diverse SRM event to date. From 12–16 May, we are hosting the Degrees Global Forum on SRM in Cape Town, bringing together researchers, policymakers, journalists, and thought leaders. With roughly 50/50 Global North–Global South participation, and representatives from all 36 Degrees research teams, it is going to re-centre the global SRM conversation and show beyond doubt that the Global South is in a position to lead on SRM.