IISc scientists receive grant to study impacts of solar radiation modification as porposed intervention to climate change

Bengaluru

Indian Institute of Science (IISc) scientists have been selected to receive a research grant from the Degrees Modelling Fund (DMF), which supports scientists in developing countries and emerging economies to explore whether a controversial proposal to reflect sunlight from the earth could reduce the regional impacts of climate change. IISc scientists are one of the 15 teams to receive the DMF grants.

According to IISc, Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), also known as solar geoengineering or climate intervention, is a proposal for reducing some of the risks of global warming. If implemented, it might involve spraying tiny particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back out into space and reduce the impacts of climate change. With global temperatures rising rapidly, SRM has the potential to be either helpful or harmful — especially in the climate-vulnerable regions of the Global South. The IISc team will use climate models to examine how SRM might affect the summer monsoon rainfall in tropical regions, especially over India — compared to the impacts of rising temperatures.

Govindasamy Bala from the IISc’s Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the principal investigator for the project said the funding is for a two-year period. “The IISc work will use climate model simulations to study the impacts of solar radiation modification on the Indian monsoon rainfall. Specifically, we will study the impacts of placing aerosols in the stratosphere. Injecting highly reflective sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere would cool the planet. But the spatial distribution of these stratospheric aerosols could have a larger influence on the Indian summer monsoon rainfall,” said Prof. Bala. “Summer monsoon rainfall is the lifeline to a vast majority in India. The first thing anyone in India would want to know is how a planetary scale intervention like SRM will affect the Indian summer monsoon,” he added.

The DMF is run as a partnership between the Degrees Initiative and The World Academy of Sciences . Since 2018, the DMF (originally called DECIMALS) has disbursed more than $1.8 million in research grants to 150 researchers in 21 developing countries.