The Case for a Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform

Interest in SRM research is growing, and it should. But the current state of affairs is deeply unfavorable for it – politically, scientifically, and in terms of the public trust on which any durable research enterprise depends. It is a credulous understatement to say the multilateral system is in no position to produce governance frameworks in the near term. Climate impacts are accelerating. And the gap between the need for well-governed research and the infrastructure to support it is widening.

The recent track record, which most readers here will know well, makes this concrete. The canceled Alameda marine cloud brightening experiment produced community backlash and a shutdown of research – not because the science was reckless but because the governance was in part skipped, and in part invisible. The for-profit startup Make Sunsets, trolling or not, launched commercial stratospheric releases with no scientific review, no engagement, and no accountability. SCoPEx, the outdoor experiment canceled in 2024 after various opposition, showed that even well-resourced, carefully designed programs can collapse when governance legitimacy is absent.

The lesson is not that any of these situations were identical. It is that the absence of a credible, shared governance infrastructure means that every new research effort creates an ad-hoc approach from scratch – and that the failures of some become the political burden of all.

This is the context in which we are working with partners to develop the Solar Geoengineering Research Governance Platform (SGRG).

What is SGRG?

SGRG is a collaborative effort among scientific associations, policy organizations, and civil society groups – initial founding organizations include the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, the American Geophysical Union, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, and the Natural Resources Defense Council – to build shared governance infrastructure for SRM research.

The core idea is straightforward: make well-informed, transparently governed research easier to conduct, and make rushed, uninformed, or unaccountable research harder to do. Further, by making credible governance visibly possible, it should change what new entrants to the SRM conversation encounter – from a closed question demanding immediate allegiance to an ongoing process in which their participation has meaning.

We did not arrive at this design quickly or in isolation. Over the past months, we have spoken with hundreds of researchers, civil society actors, policy advocates, policymakers, funders, and community representatives across every major region. What emerges from those conversations is a remarkably consistent diagnosis of a governance gap.

Many existing principles and frameworks broadly describe what responsible research should look like. What has been missing is the practical work of building the connective infrastructure to put those principles into practice: common disclosure expectations, shared engagement guidance, independent review pathways, and a transparent record that the public can actually assess. SGRG is designed to fill that gap.

These tools are designed to apply proportionally. Modeling studies, laboratory work, and outdoor experiments have different governance needs, and the platform reflects that. Core principles remain constant; their operationalization scales with context. The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), currently the largest public funder of SRM research through their Exploring Climate Cooling research program, is committed to working collaboratively with SGRG and toward becoming its first institutional adopter – a signal that this architecture can serve research programs that are already underway, not just hypothetical future ones.

Private and philanthropic funders have a particular stake in this infrastructure. Where research is not subject to government agency review processes, SGRG’s independent merit review and disclosure tools fill a gap funders cannot credibly (and should not) fill by themselves – and requiring grantees to adopt SGRG norms gives funders a good answer to the question of how their research is governed.

What SGRG is not

It matters equally to be clear about what SGRG cannot and should not be.

It cannot be a regulatory body. It will not authorize or veto research. It publishes norms and tools that institutions can voluntarily opt into; adoption is a public signal of credibility, not a legal requirement. It also cannot become a mechanism for de facto prohibition. If engagement requirements are designed so that any objection from any quarter can halt any study, the result is not governance – it is a veto dressed up as process. SGRG’s engagement guidance is designed to strengthen the legitimacy of responsible research, not to create open-ended procedural obligations that subordinate research decisions to any single stakeholder group.

This means that SGRG is not a comfortable home for two kinds of actors. It does not offer space for those who could never accept that well-governed SRM research should proceed – whose position is prohibition regardless of what governance infrastructure exists. And it does not offer space for those who could never accept meaningful oversight – who treat any governance requirement as an obstacle to be minimized. Between those poles, the tent is very large.

The platform is designed to accommodate the full diversity of views on SRM itself, united by a shared commitment to the proposition that whatever the world ultimately decides about these technologies, the decision should be informed by research that was conducted transparently, with legitimate engagement, and under credible oversight.

A shrinking window of opportunity

None of this is an argument against urgency. The window for building legitimate governance infrastructure is narrowing. New entrants are arriving – researchers, funders, commercial actors, governments – and they are encountering a landscape with no shared expectations and organized pressure from both sides. Every month that passes without credible governance norms in place is a month in which the trajectory of SRM research is shaped by whoever moves fastest, not by whoever governs best.

The founding convening of SGRG’s nodal partners and invited experts is planned for mid-2026. The immediate goal is to co-draft the Research Governance Charter and make foundational decisions on structure, workstreams, and implementation pathways. By 2027, we expect the Charter to be publicly endorsed, with initial adopters announced, review boards established, and the disclosure platform piloted. By 2030, the vision is a functioning, cross-regional governance infrastructure with multiple institutional adopters, operational regional nodes led by Global South institutions, and a track record of transparent, proportional governance that the public and policymakers can assess for themselves.

We see this as the only viable path forward. The alternatives – waiting for a multilateral treaty that is not coming, relying on individual institutional ethics boards that lack the capacity or mandate, or allowing the field to develop without shared governance at all – have already been tried, implicitly, and they have produced the failures we are now trying to recover from.

The fastest way to move forward is to invest in the foundations that make durable outcomes possible, rather than racing to conclusions that will not hold. Building governance infrastructure, expanding participation, investing in legitimate processes – these are less visible than a forced conclusion. But forced conclusions that lack legitimacy are not actually decisions; they are positions that will be relitigated indefinitely.

As we’ve argued elsewhere, the space to think, the agency to participate, the legitimacy that makes outcomes durable – none of these are possible if research itself is not governed in ways people can see, assess, and trust. That is what SGRG is building.