Elevating Global Perspectives in SRM Governance: Introducing DSG’s 2025 Early Career Fellows

DSG is excited to welcome two early-career fellows whose work reflects the core purpose of our Residency Program: bringing regionally grounded insight, interdisciplinary expertise, and lived experience into the emerging landscape of solar geoengineering governance. Sofia Kabbej and Arowolo Ayomide Victor each come to SRM from distinct research trajectories, yet both share a commitment to ensuring that communities and countries most affected by climate risks have the knowledge, agency, and representation needed to participate meaningfully in SRM conversations. These fellowships embody DSG’s belief that shaping the future of SRM governance requires more than technical expertise; it requires leadership that is attentive to power, geography, and justice.

Sofia Kabbej

My involvement in the solar radiation modification (SRM) field stems from a desire to contribute to advancing knowledge on a technology - particularly Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) - that could profoundly reshape international relations. Beyond its implications for climate governance, SAI raises deeper questions about how power and control could be exercised within the international system.

I first encountered SRM in 2018, while completing my master’s in international security studies and volunteering with the youth-led NGO CliMates. At the time, I had the opportunity to attend international negotiation meetings and contribute to the youth constituency’s adaptation working group. Back then, SRM was considered by only a few stakeholders and was surrounded by significant controversy. Although this controversy is still very much present, the field has expanded, diversifying in actors and funding sources, while scientific polarization has deepened.

These shifts have unfolded in parallel with my own development as an academic and think-tank researcher working on the security implications of climate change. My work has examined how the consequences of a warming world shape (in)security dynamics in different contexts - from defense and civil protection to development and humanitarian sectors - and how security actors integrate climate considerations into their practices and narratives.

As technologies designed to counter climate-induced warming and reduce associated risks, SRM naturally became part of this analysis. I have focused especially on SAI, given its planetary scale, and explored what its development or potential deployment could mean in a geopolitical context defined by great-power competition, hybrid warfare, and the erosion of multilateralism.

During my fellowship with DSG, I am particularly eager to deepen my research on the ongoing securitisation of SAI and to explore how SAI development might influence climate-adaptation deterrence. Considering that SAI is recognized to bear an important risk of mitigation deterrence, and that adaptation practices remain far behind what is required, this issue has not yet been explored to the extent necessary to understand the potential effects of SAI development on the resilience of human societies to climate change. Alongside this intellectual work, I I hope to: contribute to DSG’s efforts to strengthen social science integration in the SRM landscape, in part with their Climate Intervention Network’s Early Career Research engagements; support the design of their capacity building initiatives by monitoring SRM framings and narratives across Francophone national contexts—in France, where I am based, as well as in North Africa.

Arowolo Ayomide Victor

I first stumbled across SRM in late 2022 while researching something completely different: the climate effects of seasonal biomass burning across West Africa. I was tracing the atmospheric impacts of harmattan haze and farm-clearing fires when, almost by accident, I began coming across modelling studies that kept highlighting the exact same vulnerability - only this time, the aerosols weren’t from cooking fires or bush burnings; they were deliberate injections of reflective particles into the stratosphere. The same atmospheric layer we were unintentionally loading with smoke every dry season was now being proposed, in labs and funding proposals elsewhere, as a deliberate tool for cooling the planet. And virtually no one in Nigeria - not policymakers, not farmers, not even most climate activists - knew this conversation was happening.

As someone pursuing a PhD in Meteorology and Climate Science, I know very well that a shift of just a few percent in rainfall timing or volume could mean the difference between a good harvest and widespread hunger. Since Nigeria outpaces the rest of Africa in farm output, and a third of the country’s employment is agrarian, the dynamics of SRM on climate immediately became of interest to me. Then, in 2023, under the leadership of Professor Vincent Ajayi at Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria, we secured a research grant from The Degrees Initiative, an NGO dedicated to supporting scientific capacity building through Global South-led and regionally relevant SRM research. That's how my deeper journey into this field truly began.

The more I learned, the clearer it became that silence is not neutrality. The absence of Nigerian voices in these early discussions is itself a form of exclusion, especially given the complexity and polarization these technologies add to contemporary climate discourse. The technical feasibility notwithstanding, the governance, equity, and decision-making questions and concerns around SRM are particularly acute for climate vulnerable nations like Nigeria. 

Within this framing, my work as a DSG fellow, over the next six months is focused on mapping, creating and testing deliberation frameworks among key community-based stakeholders, to ensure Nigerian perspectives - whether they ultimately support tightly governed research, demand strict controls, or reject the technology outright - are informed, widely represented, and meaningfully integrated into both national and international conversations. 

My approach is guided by a simple principle: genuine deliberation must come before any decision about technologies that could alter regional climate patterns. That means starting with listening, understanding who communities already trust, what questions they have when they first hear the idea, and how those perspectives can be faithfully represented. DSG’s strict non-advocacy mandate (neither promote nor oppose SRM) is exactly the right foundation for this work. 

My job is not to persuade anyone of a particular outcome. It is to make sure that when Nigerians speak on this issue, they speak from knowledge, not from reaction. I hope my contributions here can highlight necessary elements to building a credible, multilingual, politically aware process that resonates with climate leadership and agency in Nigeria, and hopefully, African and the Global South leadership.