New fund launches to support environmental impact assessments of promising climate interventions

September 6

The new Climate Intervention Environmental Impact Fund (CIEIF, www.cieif.org) begins operations with the goal of helping kickstart new approaches to restoring Earth’s climate in the face of rapid deterioration.  CIEF makes direct grants to investigators worldwide working to stop and reverse global warming. The grants are focused on predictive environmental impact assessments, impact modeling studies, and stakeholder engagement for proposed small-scale field tests of innovative climate intervention technologies. CIEIF also offers investigators expert advice on doing impact assessment and stakeholder outreach.

CIEIF is now taking applications for 2023 for three awards of $50,000 each. The due date for applying is November 1. Grants will be made by December 15.

To be eligible, an applicant’s technology must be ready for field testing and potentially scalable to globally relevant levels. Within those criteria, the Fund is open to a range of ideas such as marine cloud brightening, coatings and structures that remove greenhouse gases, enhanced weathering, ice and land albedo enhancements, methane removal, ocean fertilization, and other ocean interventions. 

Certain other technologies are not eligible for CIEIF financial support.  For example, field tests of stratospheric solar radiation management (SRM) are ineligible, given how difficult it would be to control its effects and to govern its use. CIEIF also excludes grants for carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) and direct air capture (DAC), since they are already backed by large funding programs.

A key criterion for CIEIF-funded projects is a commitment to transparency, including publishing the results of the analysis of the project. CIEIF funding will neither replace nor undermine any applicable governmental permit processes; instead, it will complement them.

“We believe independent, objective, environmental impact analysis and well-conceived stakeholder outreach are key for progress toward scalable climate solutions,” said CIEIF’s Manager Peter T. Jenkins, a longtime Washington, DC environmental attorney and program manager with extensive experience in environmental impact assessment. “CIEIF fills a vital need for non-bureaucratic funding in an area that too many investigators have ignored or taken lightly to date. And we will aim to increase our grants in future annual funding cycles.”

In addition to Peter Jenkins CIEF is advised by Renaud de Richter, PhD., one of the world’s most knowledgeable scientists on innovative climate interventions with numerous peer-reviewed publications in the field, and attorney John Fitzgerald, who has decades of U.S. and international experience in environmental law and policy including impact assessments. 

For more details, see www.cieif.org.