The Challenges of Tracking SRM Funding: What Counts and What’s Missing?

SRM360’s updated Funding Tracker provides the most comprehensive available view of the money flowing into SRM research, advocacy, and other work. Here, we explain how we decide what counts as SRM funding, where information is limited, and what we have corrected along the way. For more on our approach, see our methodology.

A question of definition

In some cases, organisations may have small projects or limited work relating to SRM, but the bulk of their efforts and money go to other things. For example, there are a few environmental non-governmental organisations that have been active on SRM, such as the ETC Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, but their work spans much more broadly than that. Given SRM represents only a small fraction of their work, it would not be appropriate to label them an SRM organisation and include their full funding amount, and so they are excluded from our dataset. However, where it could be identified, the Tracker does include funding specifically allocated for SRM-related work in organisations with a broader focus, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Our definition of SRM focuses on interventions that could be global in scale, explicitly excluding more local ideas like sea ice thickening and urban albedo enhancement. This leads to a few curiosities in the dataset, such as with the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA): it has a “climate cooling” programme with an overall budget of £56.8 million ($77.2 million), but along with SRM research it also funds sea ice thickening research, among other ideas. ARIA has allocated £9.9 million (about $13.2 million) for its sea ice thickening project, and another portion of that overall programme’s budget has yet to be allocated. By our reckoning, the organisation has committed a total of about $46 million to SRM, rather than the project-wide $77.2 million announced; still, the smaller total puts the UK government among the biggest individual funders.

Other methodological choices also affect the totals and distribution to a small degree. For example, some funded research projects involve multiple institutions, sometimes across more than one country; for simplicity’s sake, we allocate that money only to the lead organisation, somewhat obscuring the true flows of a small amount of funding.

Some organisations’ work focuses on an overarching topic that includes SRM. That includes, for example, Renaissance Philanthropy, which has helped incubate efforts like the Arctic Stabilization Initiative (which is included in our dataset), and Outlier Projects, which funds “rigorous research to address Earth system instabilities”. Where these funders support SRM projects of organisations, we have included those totals, but we did not label these funders as SRM organisations.

The non-profit Climate Hub is a significant organisation in the field, supporting research and policymaking on a range of methods to address near-term climate risk, including SRM. However, it argues it is not an SRM-focused organisation and was one of a small number of organisations for which we were not able to get funding details, and so was excluded from our dataset.

Relying on transparency

To complete our dataset, we rely heavily on the transparency of the organisations working in the SRM field. While tax disclosures in the US – where many SRM-related organisations are based – provide details on transfers of funds from non-profits, such disclosures are not required in many other countries. The requests we send to organisations working on SRM ask for a degree of detail about their finances that could be considered unusual. While many have been willing to answer our questions in the interest of transparency, this is not the case for every organisation.

For example, the for-profit company Stardust Solutions announced in 2025 it had raised $60 million from investors, increasing its overall total to $75 million. Stardust named its investors but did not divulge how much each contributed, so in the absence of other information, we split the $60 million evenly between the investors.

Further, Stardust has acknowledged that it has provided some funding to researchers at various universities. It has not said, however, which universities or researchers, or how much, meaning that there could be a large amount of commercial funds flowing into research institutions that have not been captured in our dataset.

Money that is spent on opposing SRM would also qualify, but has been hard to quantify. The group behind the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement has acknowledged a donation from the CS Fund, but has not divulged how much was received; as such, both the CS Fund and the Non-Use Agreement are in the Funding Tracker, but without any dollar amounts attached.

We have also heard informal reports regarding funding behind the ongoing efforts to ban solar geoengineering and weather modification around the US. There is no specific information available about such an effort, and so it cannot be included. Similarly, we have been told of small assessment efforts focused on SRM in climate or security-related parts of various governments, but we have seen no indication that these involve large research projects or clandestine work on actual infrastructure or equipment.

An evolving field

In general, the field of SRM has been growing and evolving rapidly, and we will continue to monitor funding as things change. For example, since our update, a report from the American Council for Capital Formation revealed that China has plans to spend about $6 million on SRM research projects – substantially more than the $1.8 million it has spent through 2025 according to our Tracker.

We also carefully consider feedback on our Tracker. For example, we recently updated our data after an issue was pointed out regarding German government funding. This stemmed from the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam being tagged as SRM-related, when in fact only a small portion of its work is focused on SRM. Addressing this issue reduces our figure for German government funding for SRM by $9.1 million, which has been reflected in an update to our charts and articles.

In spite of the gaps outlined here, we believe the Tracker provides a reasonably comprehensive and meaningful picture of the funding into SRM. Though a firm number is by nature hard to come by, we believe our total is an underestimate within 20% of the real amount of money spent on SRM, and likely inside 10%. Moving forward, transparency will remain a critical part of a field with such potentially widespread consequences.