Second Community Climate Intervention Strategies Workshop

Overview

In October 2020, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) hosted a Community Climate Intervention Strategies (CCIS) workshop that refined a research framework for a portfolio of climate intervention options. The workshop identified the need for seven science-themed working groups, with one of the working groups: Building informed and combined scenarios. Building scientifically meaningful and policy-relevant scenarios that integrate both carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and solar radiation management (SRM) is an essential but still missing step required to move research forward in a more focused way and to inform policy makers and society on the impacts of Climate Intervention scenarios. CCIS and the workshop organizing committee therefore proposes to convene a second Community Climate Intervention Strategies Workshop with a focus on scenario design from October 31 to November 2nd, 2022, at NCAR/UCAR in Boulder. Experts in Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM), Human System Modeling (HSM), Earth System Modeling (ESM), Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) and their engineering, ecological and societal impacts, and experts in their ethical implications, will collaboratively discuss needs and guidelines to develop future scenarios that include both SRM and CDR.

Intellectual Merit

The development of scenarios that include both CDR and SRM will be an important step toward more focused research and towards producing policy and socially relevant frameworks for addressing climate change. Currently, streamlined CMIP scenarios for the most part disregard the importance of different climate intervention options, in particular SRM. Research on Climate Interventions requires new scenarios that - in addition to the physical science component - also need to consider geo-politics, social economics, as well as interactions with the human system. We propose a workshop structured in three different sections:

• Characterizing the status of existing scenarios, and their shortcomings, to identify requirements for scenarios that include both, the physical and natural response, and politically and socially implications of Climate Interventions.
• Developing guidelines and protocols for the creation of effective scenarios that include both CDR and SRM.
• Producing scenarios that are both scientifically meaningful and policy relevant, which include various climate intervention strategies and that are informed by a diverse set of stakeholders.

Broader Impacts

The consideration of Climate Intervention strategies is becoming more likely given that the high likelihood of reaching critical temperature-related thresholds in the next decade or so may not be prevented without these measures. Different reports including by the National Academy of Science and a new statement by the America Meteorological Society, suggest needed research into this topic. However, currently available climate intervention scenarios have so far not integrated the complex interactions between physical and social sciences. To work towards creating climate intervention scenarios, this workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of academic and other stakeholders, to focus discussions on the design of climate intervention scenarios including SRM and CDR. The workshop will be the first step in producing guidelines for comprehensive future scenario development and aims to design initial scenarios that can inform the sciences, as well as policy and society, to move this research in a timely manner forward.

Watch Live

While registration for full participation has closed, you can follow along with presentations and main room breakout reports at the youtube webcast links below. Recordings will also be available here on our site the week after the workshop.

Workshop Organizing Committee

Simone Tilmes, Peter Lawrence and Monica Morrison (NCAR), Tyler Felgenhauer (Duke University), Dale Rothman (George Mason University), Michael Barton (Arizona State University), Douglas MacMartin and Daniele Visioni (Cornell University), Vanessa Schweizer (University of Waterloo), Andrea Smith (UCAR)