Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Henley on 17 April (HL15076), whether they will publish any advice they have received about solar radiation management (SRM) technologies having clear winners and losers; whether they will publish the reasons for their decision to cease research into SRM technologies; whether they intend to review that decision; and if so, when.

Research into Solar Radiation Management (SRM) technologies was commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals; references are given in our published position statement, attached.

We did not commission further research because the next logical step was to do similar studies with different climate models run by institutions in other countries. This has been taken forward by the World Climate Research Programme’s Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), which has served to coordinate SRM simulations across international modelling groups. Results from this project indicate that there are still large uncertainties in the effectiveness of SRM and its potential wider impacts on the environment. This work is ongoing and the Government maintains an interest in its outputs.