A bold research initiative to stabilize the Arctic

Climate systems in the Arctic are approaching critical tipping points and there is no coordinated, system-level plan to prepare for and respond to these risks.

The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), a new stage-gated research program, has raised $6.5 million to advance the research needed to assess the safety, efficacy, and feasibility of Arctic-targeted climate interventions.

Every country that sits on a major earthquake fault line maintains a disaster risk management and response plan. They do this despite not knowing when the next earthquake will strike or how severe it will be. Forecasting earthquakes is notoriously challenging despite decades of intensive research into precursors and fault mechanics. The same reasoning extends to many other domains. Stakeholders across disciplines and jurisdictions invest readily to study risks and develop preparedness for pandemics, floods, hurricanes, and many other types of disasters. The higher the potential damages and consequences, the higher the benefit of robust preparedness.

Many of the most advanced disaster early warning systems only offer minutes of advanced notice. Other systems designed to monitor catastrophic risks and inform preparedness - whether tsunami DART buoys, hurricane satellite tracking, flood gauge networks, or volcanic seismic/GPS monitoring - offer valuable, even if short, warning windows. Such efforts require significant resources, including scientific and technical infrastructure, as well as dedicated human and financial capital. Given the prevalence of such systems, the absence of comparable infrastructure for one area of concentrated disaster risks is striking.

Introducing ASI: Advancing science and assessing how to reduce dramatically underserved risks

Preparing for, responding to, and reducing disaster risk requires two components. The first is establishing preparedness measures: the evacuation routes, the flood barriers, stockpiling relief items. The second is the coordination protocol, the agreements between governments, institutions, and communities that determine who acts, how, to what extent, under which circumstances, and on what authority. Despite the scope, scale, and the urgent need to prepare for and respond to these risks, neither core component of risk management exists for the Arctic.

The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), incubated within the Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC), a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, has raised $6.5 million in philanthropic funding to launch a systems-level research program to advance the research required to assess and address some of the most severe and near-term risks in the Arctic (and on the planet). ASI will evaluate the feasibility, efficacy, risks, and benefits of a portfolio of potential Arctic-targeted climate interventions via a stage-gated research program, focusing on how and under what conditions response options could work, drive the most impact, how they might interact with cryosphere systems, and whether a portfolio of approaches could help stabilize core components of the Arctic’s climate system. This news was also covered in Heatmap News this morning.

ASI’s goal is to deliver the formal scientific benchmark and predictive tools needed to assess the safety and efficacy of Arctic-targeted interventions to a coalition of governments, Indigenous Peoples, and multilateral institutions positioned to use them. ASI will work to convene this coalition of parties.

The initiative is led by Charlotte DeWald, PhD, a climate scientist whose research on cloud ice formation pathways and the biological, chemical, and physical systems that link the ocean to the atmosphere informs ASI’s mission. Ryan O’Donnell also serves as Senior Strategic Advisor to ASI. A former U.S. diplomat and disaster response leader, O’Donnell has spent a decade working in disaster-preparedness and response operations, and co-designing climate resilience initiatives with Indigenous Peoples. O’Donnell will lead ASI’s engagement with Indigenous Peoples, whose lands are directly affected by Arctic climate risks, and the governments and multilateral institutions whose partnership is needed for successful initiatives.

Why the Arctic is mission critical

The world is dramatically underprepared for a confluence of potentially catastrophic risks concentrated in the Arctic. Arctic stability regulates food production, water availability, and livable conditions worldwide. It loses more heat to space than it absorbs, in contrast to lower latitudes, which receive more heat from the sun than they lose to space. But the Arctic is warming at roughly four times the global average, and up to seven times faster in some subregions. It’s also home to two of the most imminently at-risk climate systems on Earth, namely the Greenland Ice Sheet and thawing permafrost. A third feature of the Arctic is also under acute pressure: the Arctic sea ice extent has declined ~12% per decade since 1979.

These Arctic climate systems are at severe, imminent risk of destabilization, especially considering the higher Arctic warming rates. They are also tightly coupled and influence each other in complex, potentially compounding and cascading ways. The threshold which, if crossed, risks “tipping” these Arctic systems (as well as many others globally) into states of irreversible destabilization, is between 1.5 and 2°C of global mean warming. That’s a temperature range the world could enter within the next decade, possibly even before 2030. Given how closely interconnected these systems are to each other and the rest of the Earth’s climate, a triggered tipping point in one or more exacerbates destabilization risk across the Arctic and the globe.

The potential near-term consequences of destabilization in these Arctic climate systems include:

1. The Greenland Ice Sheet: Loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet could drive up to 0.25 meters of sea level rise by 2100. The freshwater it’s already releasing is measurably slowing Atlantic Ocean circulation, with downstream consequences for weather across Europe, monsoon systems in South Asia and the Sahel, and coastal sea-level rise.

2. Permafrost thaw: Permafrost across Arctic regions has already shifted from acting as net a carbon dioxide and methane sink to a net source. The greenhouse gasses it previously stored are being released at accelerated rates, as warming drives more rapid thaw. By 2100, cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost could rival the total historic emissions of the United States, and these additional releases could drive a feedback loop whereby warming begets more warming.

3. Arctic summer sea ice extent: Arctic summer sea ice functions like an air conditioner for the planet. Its loss has already contributed to global warming roughly equivalent to a quarter of what global carbon dioxide emissions over the past thirty years have driven. As reflective ice gives way to dark open water, the Arctic absorbs more solar heat, accelerating every other feedback in the system. Multiple models project the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in summer by the mid-2030s.

The Arctic is best understood as a complex and critical component of Earth’s climate system that serves a societally necessary climate regulating role. It also constitutes an increasingly acute, near-term, and potentially cascading risk profile. Multiple Arctic systems are destabilizing on an accelerated timeline, with consequences that reach far beyond the region itself. The long-term consequences of a destabilizing Arctic are staggering. High end estimates place the economic toll of severe and sustained Arctic destabilization at $70 trillion over coming centuries.

Why this program doesn’t exist yet

Even under the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios, the world will likely breach the 1.5°C threshold within the decade, if not by 2030. We’re entering an “overshoot” period in which Arctic climate systems, as well as many other global climate systems, will be exposed to pressures that risk serious, systemic destabilization, regardless of how fast greenhouse gas emissions fall and carbon removal capacity scales. Decarbonization and carbon removal are absolutely necessary. But they are no longer sufficient on their own to manage near-term risks considering the processes such as ice loss and permafrost thaw already underway. Some climate systems, like coral reefs, may already be in irreversible decline.

Researchers have proposed several categories of approaches to stabilizing the Arctic alongside ongoing decarbonization and carbon removal efforts, from methods that increase atmospheric reflectivity, to those that thin heat-trapping cloud layers, to approaches that reinforce Arctic ice structurally. Some efforts have examined interventions individually, but no systematic effort has evaluated whether, under which conditions, and in which combinations a portfolio of interventions could help stabilize core Arctic climate systems.

There are structural reasons for this gap in research. Intervention approaches are often too applied for most academic research mandates, too uncertain for governments to fund unilaterally, and too complex and potentially consequential for any single institution to pursue without broad scientific and stakeholder engagement and a coordinated governance and coalition-building strategy. As a result, the field lacks a well-resourced research program to work on parallel fronts to create shared benchmarks and agreed-upon criteria governments would need before making decisions, and the mechanisms to sequence work and disseminate findings so that early results make findings actionable for scientists, governments and multilateral institutions.

As Dr. Christina McCluskey of the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a member of ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board, describes:

ASI is that program.

What’s the plan?

The first intervention ASI will advance through its stage-gated framework and evaluation process is Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning (MCT). About 60% of Arctic clouds are mixed-phase, meaning they contain both ice crystals and supercooled liquid water. For most of the year, these clouds trap more heat than they reflect. MCT aims to enhance ice formation in these clouds to reduce their heat-trapping effect, allowing more surface heat to radiate into space. Early models suggest the approach could cool the Arctic by roughly 1°C. It is also operationally analogous to existing cloud‑seeding practices in the U.S. and Canada, which offers technical and regulatory precedent that could lower political and social‑license barriers.

Phase I of ASI will leverage existing data and observations, to evaluate whether and to what extent specific interventions, such as Mixed-Phase Cloud Thinning (MCT), could help stabilize Arctic systems like sea ice and permafrost. Dust emissions and biological ice-nucleating particles from the ocean surface support ‘natural experiment’ approaches, or naturally occurring perturbations to Arctic clouds that are detectable from satellite and ground-based sensors. Analyzing how these events alter cloud phase and outgoing heat across different seasons and regions could support an estimate of MCT’s minimum potential efficacy and help identify where and when MCT could help slow sea ice loss and support stabilization. Phase I findings determine what follows. The program advances if three conditions hold: MCT remains plausibly effective in at least some target regimes, decision-critical uncertainties can be identified and addressed with additional evidence, and early screening has not revealed disqualifying large-scale concerns.

Dr. Matthew Shupe, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado and NOAA, and also a member of ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board, notes:

Alongside Dr. Matthew Shupe and Dr. Christina McCluskey, ASI’s Scientific Advisory Board also includes Dr. Graham Feingold of the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory.

The defining decade for the Arctic, and the planet

ASI was established on the premise that we have under 10 years to build a tipping point risk management approach, and was designed to produce findings within that period that governments, multilateral institutions, and Indigenous rights-holders can evaluate and act on. Some findings may establish that specific approaches carry risks that outweigh their potential benefits, or that certain interventions are not feasible at the scales that matter. That too constitutes the evidence base responsible governance requires. ASI will produce that evidence base while the findings can still shape what comes next.

Thanks for reading. I’ve been thrilled and humbled to support ASI over recent weeks and months, and look forward to continuing to do so, as they advance their research and technical intervention and governance development efforts.

For any inquiries, whether press or science-related and otherwise, you can respond directly to this email or email me at [email protected].

— Nick