Published

2 years ago

July 4, 2024

Alice Rush

Saliem Fakir is the executive director of the African Climate Foundation. Shuchi Talati (PhD) is the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.

Global temperatures have crossed 1.1^oC above pre-industrial levels. They are likely to cross the 1.5^oC Paris Agreement threshold within the next decade, and despite countries’ pledges to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions entering the atmosphere, the world is likely to breach 2^oC of warming.

Moving beyond these thresholds significantly raises the threat of irreversible tipping points around the world.

While scientists insist that decarbonization efforts, net-zero targets, and wide-scale adaptation must be prioritized, the Global Stocktake Report notes that our emissions keep rising. Given this race against time, controversial approaches are being put on the table, such as solar radiation modification (SRM, also known as solar geoengineering), a potential stopgap measure against worsening climate change.

Still in its research infancy, SRM refers to large-scale, intentional interventions that increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space to counteract some types of climate change impacts.

If ever used, it is proposed as a range of relatively fast-acting approaches with potential global benefits, but even this may well be debatable. Governance over the use or non-use of these technologies needs a global approach that requires deep public understanding.

Untangling uncertainty

SRM technologies offer two sides of the same coin – potential benefits include reducing global temperature rise and secondary benefits such as slowing the rate of sea level rise, and limiting harm to the poles, but potential risks include impacts on precipitation patterns, agriculture, and biodiversity.

Uncertainty exists in both the science and the social response.

The usefulness of SRM in the context of climate change is deeply dependent on how science unfolds, who the decision makers are, who has access, willingness, capacity and resources required to master these technologies and the context within which it exists.

Nations fail to agree ban or research on solar geoengineering

To be clear, SRM is not a solution to climate change. It can only be considered alongside robust decarbonization and adaptation efforts. Given the early stages of the development of SRM, more information, discussion, and open-minded conversations with broad groups of stakeholders are needed.

We are at a clear inflection point for the field where momentum is clearly shifting in funding, research, media, and governance. However, much of the narrative about SRM is currently being built in the Global North, where the majority of research and funding on this subject exists.

African voices unheard

The use, or non-use, of this suite of technologies will have global impacts. It is all the more important for the Global South to be actively and effectively engaged with SRM research and governance, due to its potential impacts on their climate vulnerable communities.

Despite Africa’s low contributions (< 4%) to global greenhouse gas emissions, it suffers disproportionate climate change impacts. Its agrarian-dependent economy necessitates an elevated interest in changing local and regional weather patterns; there are strong incentives for Africa to better understand the physical and socio-economic implications of SRM.

African research and policy perspectives on SRM are starting, highlighting several gaps that exist in understanding how these technologies may benefit or harm the continent’s climate efforts.

EU “green” funds invest millions in expanding coal giants in China, India

One key example is the recent deliberation on a SRM resolution at the Sixth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6). The Africa Group (AG) functioned as a bloc during the deliberation, and proposed the establishment of a publicly accessible repository of existing scientific information, research, and activities on SRM, including submissions from member states and stakeholders.

While the resolution did not reach consensus, the deliberations signified an important shift that African nations are starting to weigh in on the issue.

Building awareness

But more resources, expertise, and engagement are necessary to generate African knowledge and capacity across a range of sectors to contribute to – and start leading – SRM deliberations in the international sphere.

Policymakers across Africa need access to relevant information and an informed civil society sector to shape decisions. Diverse perspectives on whether and how to consider SRM, with grounding and knowledge in the near term, can help African nations prepare for the critical decisions to come.

Building awareness on this topic, with unbiased information rooted in science and based in the African context, will provide answers from both physical and social science perspectives for inclusive and fair SRM decision-making.

UN action on gender and climate faces uphill climb as warming hurts women

Driving demand to focus on specific issues that Africans are raising, and building their capacity to govern through their key government and NGO institutions, is necessary to enable informed deliberations on SRM regulations at national, regional and international levels.

This summer, the African Climate Foundation and The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering are kicking off a series of Africa-focused workshops to build knowledge around the science, governance, and justice dimensions of SRM.

The first two in the series will highlight African scientists and thought leaders and are virtual and open to the public.

We hope to catalyze interest and engagement across the African continent, widen public discourse on SRM and ensure these discussions go beyond certain circles of experts and the negotiating community. Debates on SRM need to reflect the full spectrum of interests in Africa, and it is time for voices across the continent to coordinate and coalesce.

The post Africa cannot afford to be complacent about solar radiation management appeared first on Climate Home News.

Africa cannot afford to be complacent about solar radiation management

Climate Change

California’s Climate Leaders Talk Clean Energy Growing Pains and the War on Iran

Published

6 hours ago

April 15, 2026

Alice Rush

Virtual power plants see a renewed push in the legislature to weather the state’s “mid-transition.”

By Claire Barber

SACRAMENTO—Not long into Ellie Cohen’s opening remarks at the California Climate Policy Summit this week, the crowd erupted in boos—at her request.

California’s Climate Leaders Talk Clean Energy Growing Pains and the War on Iran

Climate Change

Dam Useless: Barriers Prevent a Migratory Fish from Reproducing

Published

7 hours ago

April 15, 2026

Alice Rush

The Bronx River is home to obsolete dams. Plans to remove them could boost efforts to restore dwindling river herring populations.

By Lauren Dalban

The Bronx River was once a curvy waterway that ran through vast forests and flowed into networks of tidal marshland. For centuries, river herring have swum up the waterway from the East River and the Long Island Sound to lay their eggs.

Dam Useless: Barriers Prevent a Migratory Fish from Reproducing

Climate Change

Fossil Free Zones can be on-ramps to the clean energy transition

Published

8 hours ago

April 15, 2026

Alice Rush

Cecilia Requena is a Bolivian senator with Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future and Juan Pablo Osornio is engagement and policy director at Earth Insight.

In late April, delegations from dozens of governments will gather in Colombia for the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Together with the roadmaps announced at November’s UN climate summit in Brazil, which will call on countries to transition away from fossil fuels and halt deforestation by 2030, political will is building to save our most critical natural resources.

Now we need the practical application of where and how this will work – specific places where the line is drawn against new fossil fuel extraction. That is what Fossil Free Zones offer.

What is a Fossil Free Zone?

A Fossil Free Zone is a defined area demarcated by its ecological, biodiversity, or cultural significance, where exploration, extraction, and development of fossil fuels are permanently prohibited. Think tropical rainforests, key biodiversity areas, Indigenous Peoples’ territories, and critical marine ecosystems. They translate the abstract global commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels into something tangible: a map, a boundary, a legal safeguard.

The stakes for getting this right are enormous. Research shows that oil and gas blocks already overlap with approximately 179 million hectares of tropical moist forests – roughly 21% of the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asian forest cover.

Globally, almost 27% of global conventional oil resources overlap with top-priority socio-environmental areas. In 2024 alone, 85% of new oil discoveries were made offshore, frequently overlapping with marine biodiversity hotspots.

Colombia: A model for the world

No country illustrates the possibilities better than Colombia – fittingly, the nation hosting this conference (along with the Netherlands). Last September, Colombia announced a landmark ban on fossil fuel and mining extraction across its entire Amazon region – the world’s first region-wide Fossil Free Zone of its kind.

Colombia’s decision followed in the wake of our new research, which found that developing untapped reserves beneath the country’s forest would generate billions of dollars in stranded assets while doing almost nothing for national energy security. It would, however, threaten 20% of the intact Amazon forest and the territories of nearly 70% of the Indigenous and local communities whose lands overlap with fossil fuel concessions. In most of the Colombian Amazon, the cost of extraction is higher than the cost of conservation.

How a global roadmap can meet the promise to halt deforestation

Other countries are also taking steps in this direction. Mexico has 100 million hectares of similar Safeguard Zones, Guatemala ended oil extraction in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, and parliamentarians across the Amazon basin have introduced legislation to extend the ban region-wide.

The economic case for leaving fossil fuels in the ground

The fossil fuel endgame – a period of declining global demand as renewable energy scales – means that unconventional and frontier reserves in remote forests are increasingly uncompetitive. They require massive public investment in infrastructure, including roads that themselves become vectors for illegal logging, small-scale mining, and agricultural encroachment. Stranded asset risk is real and growing.

In 2025, wind and solar growth outpaced all new electricity demand, and more than a quarter of all vehicles sold were electric.

For forested nations, there is also an emerging economic logic for protection: intact forests generate jobs and revenue from protected area management, watershed services, and sustainable tourism, while supporting the small-scale agriculture that most rural economies depend on. They also underpin water security for agriculture and energy generation and act as carbon sinks. Over 33 million people are employed directly in the forest sector, and there are more than 1.6 billion small forest farm producers.

Fossil fuel investment amid volatile energy markets

Developing countries with fossil fuel reserves face genuine pressures to develop them – credit ratings, currency stability, social services, and energy security are tied to an ever-growing fossil frontier, particularly in the midst of volatile energy markets.

The conflict in Iran has amplified that volatility, spiking oil prices and giving fossil fuel-dependent governments renewed short-term pressure to expand domestic production – making the case for internationally-backed Fossil Free Zones, paired with real financial support, all the more urgent.

Innovative financial mechanisms like the Tropical Forest Forever Facility – a fund proposed at COP30 that would provide long-term, results-based payments to tropical forest nations to keep forests standing – can shift the economic scales enough to make Fossil Free Zones in high-integrity forests politically viable.

Colombia pledges to exit investment protection system after fossil fuel lawsuits

Industries leading the energy transition – renewable energy developers, green hydrogen producers, sustainable finance institutions, and technology companies with net-zero supply chain commitments – also have a direct stake in the Fossil Free Zone agenda. Moreover, the reputational and legal risks of investments in fossil fuel frontiers are escalating.

Already, 11 banks have applied various levels of financial restrictions to the oil and gas sector in the Amazon. Some of these policies are strong, others are closer to greenwashing, but these commitments prove that banks see the increasing risks.

What should emerge from Colombia conference

Our hope for the upcoming conference in Colombia is that, at a minimum, Fossil Free Zones are uplifted as part of a shared international vision for the energy transition. At best, a coalition of countries commits to include Fossil Free Zones in their national plans and establishes a shared framework with principles to identify new zones and implementation guidance for other countries.

WATCH OUR WEBINAR: Santa Marta – Fossil fuel transition in an unstable world

This is a practical on-ramp for countries that want to align with the global transition but need a concrete, geographically-defined starting point – and as a direct delivery mechanism for the deforestation roadmap, translating a global pledge to halt forest loss into specific action to thwart a real driver of deforestation.

The question is no longer whether fossil fuel extraction will end, but whether that end will be managed or chaotic, putting the planet’s most critical ecosystems in danger. Fossil Free Zones offer a hope of preventing irreversible harm to the forests, marine ecosystems, and Indigenous communities that represent humanity’s best remaining insurance against climate collapse – one territory at a time.

The post Fossil Free Zones can be on-ramps to the clean energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.