Four programs. One shared goal.
CCI conducts open-source research across four programs spanning stratospheric delivery, marine cloud brightening, catastrophic event response, and governance. Each is designed to advance understanding of feasibility, risks, and policy requirements.
Skypipe: Ground-Based Stratospheric Delivery Platform
A central engineering barrier shared by all stratospheric intervention concepts is delivery: how to move large quantities of material from the ground to the stratosphere continuously, reliably, and at manageable cost.
Skypipe is a ground-based delivery concept that uses a novel lift mechanism, wall shear from fast moving gas inside fabric tubes, to support a continuous conduit from the surface to stratospheric altitude. It requires no balloon, no tether, and no aircraft fleet. The same platform that could deliver reflective aerosol for climate contingency could also deliver material to promote agglomeration and sedimentation of particles created by catastrophic events like volcanic eruptions or asteroid impact.
CCI is evaluating Skypipe's technical feasibility through physics-based modeling. Our analysis indicates the concept warrants serious technical evaluation. Formal results, including limitations and unresolved questions, will be published in forthcoming technical papers.
Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB)
MCB increases the reflectivity of certain marine clouds by influencing their microphysical properties through targeted seawater aerosol injection. The approach has applications ranging from broad-area climate contingency to targeted protection of vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs.
CCI's MCB program was inspired by the late Professor Stephen Salter, whose 2008 spray-vessel design transformed MCB from a dormant theoretical proposal into an active field of research. Salter demonstrated that a concrete engineering concept can catalyze an entire discipline. His spray technology is now being tested on the Great Barrier Reef as a countermeasure against coral bleaching.
The principal engineering challenge remains generating droplets with diameters in the sub-micron range, roughly 0.8 µm, efficiently and at scale. CCI leverages cross-disciplinary expertise in fluid dynamics and thermal sciences to explore breakthrough possibilities in aerosol generation.
Volcanic Eruption and Asteroid Impact Winter Countermeasures
Some atmospheric catastrophes are not choices, they are events. A Tambora-scale volcanic eruption or an asteroid or comet impact would produce global consequences that no existing technology can address. There is currently no countermeasure capability for any of these scenarios.
CCI investigates whether a general-purpose stratospheric delivery platform could open response options for these events. Potential countermeasures include delivering material to promote agglomeration and accelerate sedimentation of aerosols. These applications share the same delivery engineering as climate contingency work, but operate in a fundamentally different governance space: emergency response to natural disaster, where the political obstacles to action are far lower.
This program also examines what monitoring and detection infrastructure would be needed to characterize a catastrophic atmospheric event rapidly enough for an intervention to be useful, capabilities that serve every governance scenario, including the decision not to intervene.
Governance and Risk Assessment
Atmospheric intervention technologies raise governance questions as consequential as the technologies themselves. Different applications sit at different points on the governance spectrum. Counteracting a volcanic winter, an emergency response to a natural disaster, raises fundamentally different questions than counteracting anthropogenic warming, where the decision to intervene is a choice rather than a reaction.
CCI's governance program develops the technical and analytical foundations that policymakers need to evaluate atmospheric contingency technologies. This includes characterizing technical barriers, identifying how specific architectures affect verifiability and attribution, analyzing how fixed-location delivery systems differ from distributed ones in governance terms, and mapping the institutional landscape from existing disaster-response frameworks through the harder problem of multilateral SRM governance.
CCI believes governance must develop before deployment capability. A technology that proves ungovernable should be treated as ungovernable, regardless of its technical promise.
Expand CCI's research capacity.
CCI's initial programs have passed Preliminary Feasibility Review. We are now seeking scientific, engineering, and philanthropic partners to advance this research.