Jessica Gurevitch:
Potential Ecological Risks and Impacts of Solar Radiation Modification and Why You Should Pay Attention

Climate intervention is a set of proposed activities designed to intentionally modify global climate to reduce anthropogenic global warming. A major proposed approach, solar radiation management (SRM), aims to deliberately reduce or stabilize the temperatures by reflecting incoming solar radiation to increase Earth’s albedo. The most well studied approach to SRM is stratospheric aerosol intervention (SAI). While a great deal of work has been done on climate projections for SAI, almost nothing is known about its predicted ecological impacts. I will talk about what is known and unknown about the predicted impacts and risks of SAI on ecological systems, and why the involvement of scientists who study risk is important in assessing the possible future of SAI.

Dr. Jessica Gurevitch is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, a research university of the State University of New York. Dr. Gurevitch’s research interests span several traditional categories within the field of ecology, including research synthesis and meta-analysis, biological invasions, and broadly in ecology with a focus on plant communities and populations. She introduced contemporary quantitative research synthesis and meta-analysis to the fields of ecology and evolution, changing the way scientists in these fields conceptualize and review scientific data. This work has been controversial and highly influential, and grew out of her interests in applying rigorous statistical methodology to the analysis of ecological data and the design of ecological experiments.

In addition to carrying out scientific studies, Prof. Gurevitch has co-authored and co-edited several books, including Design and Analysis of Ecological Experiments (Scheiner and Gurevitch 1993, Chapman and Hall; 2nd ed. 2001, Oxford University Press), The Ecology of Plants (Gurevitch, Scheiner and Fox, Sinauer Assoc. 2002, 2006, 3rd ed. 2020—just out) and Handbook of Meta-analysis in Ecology and Evolution (2013, Koricheva, Gurevitch and Mengersen, Princeton University Press). In addition, Prof. Gurevitch co-authored an early software package for meta-analysis in ecology ( MetaWin 2.0 , Rosenberg, Adams and Gurevitch, publ. Sinauer Assoc.) as well as an open-access package, OpenMEE (2013, with several collaborators).