Reflective

Even in a best-case scenario where drastic emissions cuts and rapid scaling of carbon dioxide removal limit warming to less than 2C this century, we are facing a world with significant near-term climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and increasing risk of catastrophic “tipping points.” Simultaneously, climate change is forecasted to displace over 200M people by 2050, posing significant risk to domestic and global stability.

Current evidence suggests that SAI may be the only option to hold temperatures closer to the Paris 1.5C target, thereby reducing climate-related harms to vulnerable populations around the world, protecting the natural environment, and easing the burden of adaptation. 

But how SAI is deployed really matters, on both physical and geopolitical levels. A coordinated, international effort that deploys aerosols in both hemispheres could, according to current research, produce relatively uniform cooling around the planet.  Unilateral deployment in a single hemisphere, however, could drastically change precipitation patterns around the globe, endanger the food supplies of billions, and lead to international conflict. 

While we understand, in broad strokes, that stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) could cool the planet, we don’t know nearly enough about how different SAI deployment strategies alter the effects of SAI (“good” and “bad”) for everyone on the planet. Moreover, there are huge uncertainties: there are known uncertainties in the models used to predict the effects of SAI deployment, we lack the experimental data required to further verify our models and reduce those uncertainties, and there has been little engineering work conducted to ensure that the situations being modeled reflect real-world constraints.

To this end, we have launched Reflective, a philanthropically-funded research organization aiming to radically accelerate the pace of SAI research, such that the world is equipped with the data and tools needed to make informed decisions about SAI, fast enough to matter.