The Climate Response Fund

The Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies Asilomar Conference Center Pacific Grove, CA March 22-26, 2010 Presented by The Climate Response Fund and The Climate Institute The Climate Response Fund is coordinating an international conference to develop norms and guidelines for controlled experimentation on climate engineering or intervention techniques. The International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies aims to minimize the risks associated with scientific research on climate intervention or climate geoengineering, much as the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA successfully modeled safe and appropriate laboratory management methodologies. The Asilomar Conference will focus exclusively on the development of risk reduction guidelines for climate intervention experiments. Download the Report of the Asilomar Conference The Climate Response Fund The Climate Response Fund was founded in 2009 to foster discussion of climate intervention research (sometimes called geoengineering or climate engineering) and to decrease the risk that these techniques might be called on or deployed before they are adequately understood and regulated. The Climate Response Fund urges immediate and extensive emissions reductions to address the threat of climate change and its impacts.  This is the most important response to climate change that individuals, organizations and governments can make. However, progress on reducing emissions has been slow.  Scientists fear that without faster progress, there could be large impacts to economies and societies that result in calls for greater intervention to actively remove CO2 or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere on a large scale or to offset the effects of greenhouse gases.  Many prominent scientists and scientific societies have called for research into these climate intervention techniques and we agree.  It would not be wise to wait until we find ourselves in a climate emergency to explore the potential responses to unacceptable climate change. Such research must be carried out safely and responsibly, however, after thoughtful consideration of the most appropriate norms and guidelines for experimentation.  The Climate Response Fund was formed to encourage and enable such deliberation. The Climate Response Fund Mission • Foster safe and responsible research on climate intervention by - providing a neutral forum where norms and guidelines for climate intervention research can be discussed and developed - working with national and international partners to encourage appropriate organizations to incorporate the suggested norms and guidelines into their deliberations on climate intervention research • Work with national and international partners to communicate information about climate intervention research to interested groups and the general public.