The cryosphere is deteriorating more quickly than our capacity to study, sample, or safeguard it – but at the same time, this is opening a remarkable window of scientific endeavour. This was the focus of GESDA’s Fourth Villars Anticipation Workshop, held on 22 to 24 June 2026. The strength of the meeting lay in the range of disciplines and geographies convened: 20 leading experts spanning glaciology and paleoclimatology, cryosphere microbiology, protein engineering and biotechnology, atmospheric science, environmental and climate governance, environmental social science, and Indigenous and community knowledge.
Participants came from institutions across Switzerland, Europe, North America, the Nordic and Arctic regions, Australia, the Himalayas (Ladakh), and beyond – reflecting a part of GESDA’s wider community of close to 2400 scientists from 90 countries.
The diversity of participants was matched by that of the ecosystems considered. Discussions spanned mountain glaciers and glacier streams, the great polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, sea ice, permafrost and its ancient hypersaline brines, seasonal snow, proglacial and high-altitude lakes, ice cores as deep-time archives, and the glacier-fjord-ocean interface. During the workshop the cryosphere was situated within GESDA’s broader Eco-augmentation work, drawing explicit parallels to challenges with governing and accelerating interventions in coral reefs, forests, and drylands, and positioning Swiss glaciers as the first of a proposed network of demonstrator sites.
Across three days the meeting moved deliberately from anticipation to action, asking not only whether we should intervene to protect frozen systems but setting out what is already technically possible today and what could become possible within 5, 10 and 25 years. This note foregrounds the projects, tools, and applications that emerged, and the breadth of ecosystems and expertise brought to bear on them. Governance emerged as an essential sphere of enablement and guardrail of these endeavours.
Concrete projects and opportunities
Safeguarding what remains
Preservation is in itself an intervention – and the most immediately actionable one. The proposed Microbial Initiative for the Cryosphere would systematically sample and biobank the microbial communities of glaciers worldwide before they vanish, securing living and genetic material so that future generations can study, and potentially restore, these ecosystems. In parallel, glaciologists are racing to extract and archive ice cores from retreating glaciers – an effort embodied by the Ice Memory initiative, a project backed by research institutions in France and Italy – because each lost glacier erases an irreplaceable record of past climate, atmosphere, and biology. The opportunity here is to create a coordinated global biobank and ice-archive network, minimising regulatory complexity while maximising scientific and cultural value. If work starts now, this value will compound over decades.
Charting the frozen biosphere
The cryosphere is one of the planet’s largest biological blind spots. It is a vast, largely uncharacterised reservoir of microbial life with direct biotechnological value, but recent analyses suggest that up to 80 per cent of its species remain unknown. Remedying this ignorance is a huge challenge but is becoming tractable thanks to advances in robotics-enabled sampling and microbiome data science.
A collaboration between the environmental-genomics group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Laboratory of Sustainable Robotics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) is using autonomous surface drones and aerial platforms to sample the inaccessible glacier-fjord interface in Greenland. It couples in situ filtering and water collection with “long-read” metagenomics, put simply, to collect and analyse genetic material collected from water without a long and arduous journey to return the material to a lab, during which time it could degrade. Field campaigns have already yielded tens of gigabases of sequences from nanogram-scale DNA and recovered the complete genome of a previously undescribed methylotrophic species.
This is proof of concept that robotics can perform high-quality microbial genome recovery in locales that humans cannot reach. The opportunity is to deploy robotics that augment human sampling capacity worldwide, feeding into a shared framework for microbiome data science (already under development at large scale) purpose-built to turn raw genomic sequences from the cryosphere into usable biological knowledge.
“Mining” for genomes
Once the frozen biosphere has been charted it can be “mined” for genomes. This is potentially an extremely valuable activity: in other environments, it has repeatedly revealed thousands of new biosynthetic gene-cluster families and, from them, novel bioactive molecules with measurable pharmaceutical activity. The cryosphere, as the least sampled of these environments, is a plausible source of comparable – and chemically distinct – discoveries.
Research presented at the Villars meeting points to the relevance of such work to the cryosphere itself. A newly discovered class of proteins from Mortierellaceae fungi serve as nuclei for ice formation. These fungi are widely occurring, and the nucleating proteins are cell-free, exceptionally stable, and active at picomolar concentrations – reported as roughly a thousand-fold more potent than bacterial nucleators. Anti-freeze and ice-binding proteins, studied for decades in fish, insects, plants, and microbes, provide a complementary toolkit for controlling where and how nucleated ice would form and grow.
This raises the exciting prospect of biodegradable snow- and ice-making agents that could have multiple applications: glacier and piste preservation, and lower energy consumption in snow-making; water management and fog or cloud interactions in arid regions; and cold-chain, food, and organ preservation. Mass production and bioengineering field trials (for example, in Utqiagvik, Alaska) are already being scoped. It is plausible that investigating the biology of the cryosphere will reveal additional potent stabilising agents – after all, this is where they would be most likely to occur.
Mitigation and adaptation
Decarbonisation is ultimately the only way to save the world’s cryosphere. Without rapid decarbonisation, any mitigation strategy will at best delay the inevitable loss of glaciers and their natural capital rather than preserve them.
There are already efforts being made to actively slow cryosphere loss: reflective covers and blankets, targeted snow-making, and modification of ice nucleation to build or maintain ice. Community-scale versions already exist, such as the Himalayan ice stupas, effectively artificial glaciers which store winter water as ice for spring irrigation. These offer templates for locally owned, low-tech intervention.
GESDA’s proposal is to test such measures responsibly through sandboxed demonstrator sites, beginning with Swiss glaciers, where feasibility, effectiveness, and side effects can be studied under controlled conditions before any thought of scaling. These would sit within its Eco-augmentation framework alongside reef-protection ventures and other regional demonstrators, enabling shared methods and lessons across ecosystems.
Participants were candid that the effectiveness of such proposals is for the most part unproven at best. Some do not meet the thresholds of viability, given our current knowledge and technology. The takeaway, however, was not to dismiss the ideas but to treat the demonstrator sites as instruments for rigorous, mechanistic testing: establishing what actually works, at what scale, and with what ecological consequences, and what kind of local acceptability and desirability perspectives need to be considered. There was also widespread agreement that investments in adaptation interventions should be matched by those made for the purposes of mitigation.
Governance from the ground up
Interventions to protect, preserve, or restore the cryosphere fall largely, but not entirely, into a regulatory void. There are already some relevant pieces of international law, notably the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (often abbreviated as ENMOD). This would be likely to apply to at least some cryosphere interventions. There are other treaties and instruments which could also be pertinent, but most are not legally binding, are dormant, or have critical gaps in their provisions. For instance, environmental interventions conducted close to or in outer space are essentially ungoverned, because the Outer Space Treaty (1966) has no environmental provisions.
The meeting’s emphasis was that governance should be built from the ground up around concrete, testable projects rather than in the abstract. A pragmatic path would be to start with small, single-jurisdiction interventions (ideally a single, definable glacier), where questions of consent, liability, and environmental risk are manageable, and to let those frameworks mature before contemplating transboundary or global-commons action. Free, prior, and informed consent of affected – often Indigenous – communities must be central, and governance must be able to limit or halt interventions, not merely enable them. Framed this way, governance becomes the mechanism that lets the most promising projects proceed safely at an appropriate pace.
An anticipated timeline
Synthesising the projects above, participants sketched a trajectory of opportunity across GESDA’s three horizons:
5-year horizon
Robotics and long-read sequencing dramatically expand cryosphere sampling; large biobanks and ice archives are secured. Next-generation ice-nucleating agents enter production and field trials are designed with the assistance of directly affected communities. Ecologically diverse cryosphere data begins improving generative-AI models of biology.
10-year horizon
Direct access to microbial producers enables biotechnological use of cryosphere molecules. Digital and living records of the cryosphere microbiome are maintained in real time. Soluble, stable ice-nucleating particles are trialled for atmospheric and water applications.
25-year horizon
Discovery of genuinely new cell biology from frozen systems reshapes our understanding of life. Microbial genetic resources help fund conservation. Validated, well-governed interventions are available where communities choose to deploy them.
The Future of Cryosphere Research
Introduction: A growing challenge
There is an urgent need for a practice-informed governance framework covering potential interventions to preserve the cryosphere – the portions of Earth’s surface where water is frozen as ice, snow, or permafrost.
The cryosphere is extremely vulnerable to global warming. The overwhelming majority of glaciers are retreating, threatening floods and droughts for downstream communities. The Arctic is warming two to four times faster than any other part of the planet, causing sea ice to retreat. Permafrost is thawing, releasing greenhouse gases and damaging infrastructure. The great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are destabilising, contributing to sea-level rise.
The erosion of the cryosphere is not just about the degradation of the physical environment: it is also about the destruction of unique ecosystems, few of which have been studied in any depth. As well as charismatic animals like polar bears and penguins, the cryosphere is home to an enormous diversity of microbes. Most are uncharacterised and represent a trove of information about evolution and past ecosystems. They are also a biotechnological resource which could yield useful molecules, such as novel antibiotics. Moreover, millions of people live in the cryosphere. They have developed unique cultures and ways of life that are inextricably linked to the cold conditions.
Due to these mounting threats, some entrepreneurs and researchers are pushing for interventions to safeguard what remains. Some are trying to sample as much of the cryosphere as possible and store it in secure locations, so that future generations can still study it. Others are seeking to protect it in situ: for instance, by placing reflective white blankets on glaciers and ice sheets, or by spraying water droplets into the air to create artificial snowflakes.
However, such interventions raise a host of problems. There is little consensus within the research community over whether they would be effective or what the unintended consequences would be. They also pose a geopolitical and ethical challenge: many components of the cryosphere cross national borders, exist as global commons, or are home to Indigenous communities.
Consequently, it is vital that governments establish a framework for deciding if and when such interventions can be researched and deployed. Any such governance framework needs to put free, prior, and informed consent at its heart. Indigenous and local communities must be enabled to take a leading role in the development and deployment of any interventions involving their lands. Researchers and proponents of cryosphere interventions must engage in long-term good-faith engagement and mutually beneficial research with these communities.
Key opportunities
High-resolution modelling: By using graphics cards and other advanced computing technology, our models of ice sheets and glaciers can achieve far higher resolutions than previously possible. This will enable early-warning systems of natural disasters such as glacial collapses and better forecasts of cryosphere-driven threats such as sea-level rise.
Planetary archives: Ice is a library of Earth’s past climates and ecosystems. The information locked away in ice can help us understand the workings of the Earth system. Creating biobanks of cryosphere microbes will preserve ecosystems. Palaeoecological data from ice cores can help us predict how ecosystems will respond as the climate continues to warm. It is vital to secure this archive for future generations and not allow it to melt away.
Biotechnology from the ice: Ice-bound ecosystems like glaciers are largely unexplored but they contain a trove of microbes that are not found anywhere else. These microbes possess novel enzymes and other biomolecules, some of which will have uses in industry and medicine. In particular, cryosphere microbes are likely to be sources of novel antibiotics that will help with the antimicrobial-resistance crisis. Such biotechnologies are a potential revenue stream for cryosphere communities.
Cryosphere and climate governance: Policy-makers, researchers, Indigenous rights-holders, local communities, and other stakeholders have an opportunity to co-create new governance frameworks for interventions in the cryosphere, for which there is an urgent need. Such frameworks should prioritise informed consent from affected communities and open, systematic, anticipatory decision-making. Securing wide consensus for how, why, and when we should intervene will help policy-makers to enable a more just and effective climate transition.
Physical changes to the cryosphere
The cryosphere is extremely vulnerable to climate change, perhaps more so than any other region of the planet. Ice sheets, glaciers, snow cover, and sea ice are all in retreat, driven by warmer temperatures caused by humanity’s ongoing release of greenhouse gases.1
Under high-emissions scenarios, melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will contribute 30 centimetres to sea-level rise by 2100; this could escalate to 4.4 metres by 2300. The sea ice around Antarctica, which previously seemed resilient to global climate change, underwent a shift change in 2015-17 and has since hit several record lows of coverage.2
Several components of the cryosphere – land-ice volume, sea-ice area, permafrost mean temperature, and snow cover – are already outside their safe operating space.3 There is still some scope to recover from this situation: lower emissions could significantly reduce Antarctica-driven sea-level rise by 2300.4 Some glaciers, like Switzerland’s Great Aletsch Glacier, can still be preserved – at least in part – by cutting emissions and limiting the temperature rise.5 But others, like the Athabasca glacier system in Canada, have passed a point of no return. Substantially reversing the losses to the cryosphere would probably take tens of thousands of years.6
This is directly impacting the millions of people who live in or depend on the cryosphere. For Indigenous Arctic peoples, the retreating sea ice is a major challenge for traditional hunting and fishing practices. Shorter winters and changing snowfall patterns are a problem for reindeer-herding and winter tourism. Thawing permafrost is damaging buildings and other infrastructure.
Furthermore, the consequences of changes in the cryosphere will not be limited to the cryosphere, which performs many functions in the Earth system.7 The ice sheets reflect sunlight back into space, helping to stabilise the climate. Glaciers regulate the supply of fresh water into rivers, reducing the risk of floods and droughts. The melting of ice sheets and glaciers significantly contributes to global sea-level rise. Processes like these mean the cryosphere exerts powerful feedbacks on the entire Earth system.
As the cryosphere destabilises, it is becoming a driver of climate change. For instance, the melting of the Arctic increases the risk that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will slow down or weaken, with huge knock-on effects for regional climates.8 Both the West Antarctic ice sheet and Greenland ice sheet are tipping elements, meaning they can be pushed past a point of no return leading to slow but unstoppable collapse.9 The world’s permafrost is now becoming a net source of greenhouse gas emissions, instead of a sink.10 The tipping points of some of these climate stabilisation systems probably lie below the 2°C global-warming threshold,11 and breaching them may exacerbate global climate change.
The destruction of the cryosphere would also be a drastic and irretrievable loss for science. Earth’s ice has built up over millions of years, trapping gases, minerals, and microbes which amount to a record of the planet’s past. The deeper one drills into long-frozen ice, the further back the record goes. Ice cores have been crucial for reconstructing how Earth’s climate has varied in response to greenhouse gases and other drivers.12 Such data is crucial for guiding our forecasts of future climate change, but global warming is destroying the raw material for ice-core science.13 In response, the Ice Memory Foundation is collecting ice cores from vanishing glaciers worldwide and storing them for the next generation of scientists. The cores are being preserved at Concordia Station in Antarctica, where the mean annual temperature is -55°C and the temperature is never warm enough to melt ice.
There is also considerable scope to improve our models of cryosphere elements like glaciers and ice sheets. When more glaciers are present they lead to faster erosion of mountain ranges.14 Advances in dating technology have allowed more precise reconstructions of how glaciers and ice sheets have changed,15 revealing their long-term behaviour patterns.16 Researchers are eager to develop accurate dating methods that can be applied much faster than existing techniques. Uncertainties in these models are the main source of uncertainty in predictions of sea-level rise and of more localised threats like glacial-lake outburst floods.17 This is because existing models rely on old-style central processing units with limited parallel processing, so they cannot explore the full variety of parameters, cannot ingest the flood of data from satellites, and offer too coarse a spatial resolution to accurately simulate structures like mountains and valleys. However, modern graphics cards offer far more parallel processing, enabling models with a resolution of 100 metres instead of 2000 metres, which can properly describe topography.18
5-year horizon
Robots enable faster research in the cryosphere and exploration of more extreme ice environments. GPU-driven models of ice flow and the Earth system come into widespread use, enabling higher-resolution modelling, significant reductions in uncertainties in sea-level rise, and multidimensional simulations of glaciers. Improved monitoring enables the creation of early-warning systems for key elements like the West Antarctic ice sheet.
10-year horizon
Creation of an archive of ice cores from around the world by the Ice Memory Foundation. Advances in dating technology enable more accurate and rapid geochronology of ice and snow. Creation of a database of high-priority glaciers, for instance those with the oldest ice or most unique ecosystems. Creation of a global open-access platform for glacial-outflow flood risk and exposure.
25-year horizon
A global ice-core heritage library is fully available to scientists. Quantum sensors, currently being studied for defence purposes, are redeployed to scan the cryosphere. Ice cores are gathered quickly and cheaply using drones and other automated technologies.
Ecological changes in the cryosphere
The cryosphere is home to some of the world’s most unique and under-studied ecosystems. While charismatic megafauna like polar bears and emperor penguins are fairly well studied, many smaller organisms are less understood. The extent and diversity of microorganisms living in the cryosphere have only recently started to come to light; they can be found in even its most extreme regions.19 Ice also serves as an archive of past ecosystems: it is often laid down annually, recording tens of thousands of years of shifting microbiomes and their interactions with the rest of the Earth system.20
Alongside the deep sea and the underground microbiome, the cryosphere is one of the biggest unexplored ecosystems on Earth. Analysis of existing data indicates that it contains organisms, metabolic processes, and ecological interactions not found anywhere else.21 Glaciers, for example, support enormous numbers of microbes, which transform carbon and nitrogen and thus act as a foundation for downstream ecosystems.22 The Tibetan Plateau alone has yielded 968 candidates for new species and over 25 million genes.23
Researchers are now using advanced metagenomics techniques, which can reconstruct entire genomes from millions of snippets of DNA, to sift through the vast amount of genetic material in ice and identify new species. For instance, cryoconite – the powdery dust found scattered on the surfaces of some glaciers – is home to a diverse array of microorganisms, which survive using a variety of metabolic strategies.24 Glaciers also act as cradles of evolution, where new species can arise and then spread.25 Exploring these ecosystems remains a challenge, however, due to the extreme conditions. Ocean-glacier interfaces are particularly difficult because the shifting sea ice is so hazardous. Yet these are also rich ecosystems, where marine and cryosphere organisms mix. Some researchers are now using robots to sample these ecosystems,26 with promising early results.27
Despite the difficulties, researchers are eager to explore the cryosphere microbiome because it has enormous biotechnological potential, comparable with those of coral-reef ecosystems.28 Cryosphere microbes contain a host of promising biomolecules, including biosynthetic gene clusters, which can produce chemicals useful to agriculture, medicine, and industry; novel CRISPR systems that could be harnessed for gene editing; and PET hydrolases that could digest waste plastic. Cryosphere-adjacent ecosystems like the deep water in fjords are similarly promising: some contain microbes that digest methane, one of the major greenhouse gases. Sequence data from the cryosphere could also be used to train specialised AIs called protein language models, which can predict the functions of unknown proteins based on their amino-acid sequence. Improving these models should enable the rapid design of new proteins. Data on cryosphere biodiversity could potentially be commercialised by licensing to biotechnology companies, but a key challenge is to improve processes for moving from genome-sequencing data to biotechnological applications, which remains slow and difficult.
However, the vast potential of the cryosphere microbiome is under threat due to our warming climate. Global thawing has a paradoxical effect on research: previously inaccessible biological resources could become accessible, but some of them could be lost before we reach them. Studies suggest most genes are only found in one habitat, so the loss of even a single glacier can wipe out a trove of genetic material.29 Microbes that are highly adapted to ice and cold will find themselves under threat, while the thawing of permafrost may cause other species to explode in numbers – with knock-on effects for the rest of the ecosystem.30 As glaciers retreat, previously separated regions become connected, allowing the more adaptable microbes to spread while threatening the endemics.
The proposed Microbial Initiative for the Cryosphere aims to collect as many cryosphere microbes as possible and, like a seed bank, store them for future generations. As well as their intrinsic moral worth, the biological processes used by these microbes may be useful – including, potentially, for protecting the cryosphere itself.31
5-year horizon
Global mapping of the cryosphere microbiome produces a present-day snapshot of what is out there; robots may assist with this. At-risk cryosphere organisms are prioritised for genome sequencing and biobanking. Existing ice archives are systematically analysed for their microbiomes. Non-destructive methods are developed to explore the contents of ice without melting it. Data from the cryosphere microbiome is used to improve generative AI models of biology and train protein language models.
10-year horizon
Digital and live records of the cryosphere microbiome are assembled. Maps are created of the microbiome’s variations over both space and time, based on improved reconstructions of past microbiomes. Development of transgenic crops resistant to cold and frost, based on cryosphere microbiome research.
25-year horizon
Some cryosphere microbes become extinct in the wild. Non-invasive multi-element and isotopic investigation of microbial content of ice cores is commonplace. There are now established revenue streams based on genetic resources from the cryosphere microbiome. Comprehensive understanding of the role of microbes and microbial molecules in causing rain and snow, leading to improved weather forecasts. These advances start being used to investigate extraterrestrial cryospheres, such as those on Mars or Europa.
Intervening in the cryosphere
The cryosphere is of enormous value to the world and incalculable value to the communities that live in it or depend on it. While the world is currently on course to warm more than the global target of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, it could aim to bring the temperature back down below 1.5°C before 2100 through a combination of steep emissions cuts and carbon-dioxide removal.32 But this ambitious scenario may not happen – global decarbonisation efforts have proven quite insufficient in speed and scope – and would still not save the most vulnerable parts of the cryosphere. Moreover, adaptation of human systems is needed for coping with the changes already experienced and with the changes ahead due to the existing emissions levels in the atmosphere. Other approaches, like solar-radiation modification and other forms of geoengineering, are less certain still.
Some researchers and entrepreneurs therefore argue that we should make more active and targeted interventions in the most significant and worst-affected areas of the cryosphere. Interventions with local impacts can be considered a form of adaptation, while actions with global impacts may instead constitute geoengineering.33
Several approaches have been proposed for stabilising ice sheets and other cryospheric elements, all with potential, challenges, and limits.34,35 Some small-scale trials have been attempted. In the European Alps, some communities have placed geotextile blankets atop glaciers to reflect sunlight and provide insulation, reducing meltwater.36 This method seems unlikely to scale. A recent experiment off the coast of Svalbard sought to regrow sea ice by pumping up seawater from below: the seawater then spread over the ice and froze. While this resulted in thicker ice, it did not delay the disappearance of the ice in summer.37 Flexible curtains anchored to the seabed could prevent warm water reaching the grounding lines of ice shelves, slowing melting.38
A promising approach is to create artificial snow as either local adaptation or, on a larger scale, as climate intervention. Producing artificial snow on top of ice sheets has been proposed but is still far from being actionable.39 On the other hand, ski resorts have widely adopted snow-making as an adaptation strategy for alleviating the impacts of warmer winters, shorter snow-cover seasons, and more unpredictable snow patterns, either by using snow cannons to produce additional snow from water for their slopes or by storing snow over the summer for ensuring an early season start.40,41 A more recent development in snow-making is the spraying of snowpack with a protein from the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. The protein causes water to freeze at a higher temperature, generating snow. The efficiency of the process is currently low, but many microorganisms produce similar ice-binding proteins, some of them far more powerful.42 A newly discovered class of ice-nucleating proteins from fungi is orders of magnitude more efficient at causing snow to form.43 It is now being readied for mass production and cloud-seeding trials.
Alternatively, ice can be preserved in artificial towers called ice stupas. Liquid water is channelled downstream and shot into the air, whereupon it condenses as it falls and forms a conical tower. These can smooth out month-to-month variations in water flow, offering farmers a secure supply.
There is little consensus in the scientific community about the plausibility or desirability of any of these schemes.44 A review by leading cryosphere researchers examined five such interventions, including thickening sea ice, slowing the flow of ice sheets by removing lubricating water from the base, and sea curtains to protect ice-sheet boundaries. Any truly responsible intervention, the authors argue, would need to be scientifically feasible and carry minimal environmental risks. It would also need to be reasonably affordable, given its proposed benefits. It would have to work at a suitably large scale in a suitably short time frame. And it would need to be competently and transparently run. None of the five interventions currently meet these standards, they concluded.45 However, these conclusions have been challenged as premature. Others argue that the research is still preliminary and may yet yield viable proposals.46
Many unanswered questions remain, for example how the various methods would interact if combined and how rapidly and widely they could be deployed. There is a lack of systematic research, although initiatives like the UArctic library of climate interventions and the associated assessments are beginning to change that.47
Such interventions also raise challenging ethical questions. While refraining from action may seem cautious and therefore wise, humanity is acting to destroy the cryosphere by emitting greenhouse gases – so there is no option that does not involve taking action. Some argue it is a moral imperative to study these methods to alleviate suffering and losses caused by climate change. Others contend that the resources used would be better deployed in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, for instance because the cryosphere interventions are unlikely to succeed.
5-year horizon
High-resolution ice modelling used to assess intervention strategies like drilling holes in glaciers to reduce pressure. Detailed understanding of ice-nucleating protein structures and mechanisms, enabling rational design of more powerful ones. Small-scale “clinical trials” of cryosphere interventions at demonstrator sites.
10-year horizon
Ice-nucleating proteins deployed to cause precipitation in local areas, allowing water to be refrozen cheaply, efficiently, and at large scale. An intervention tracker allows transparent global monitoring of all experiments and proposed deployments.
25-year horizon
Wide-scale climate-engineering deployment to alleviate extreme events like drought and flooding. Scaling up of successful models of re-glaciation
Governance of cryosphere interventions
There is currently no governance framework for these proposed interventions in the cryosphere. One is urgently needed. If a technology or intervention is socially and environmentally desirable, a regulatory framework is required for it to be widely adopted, providing confidence that its use will not lead to later sanctions. Conversely, if it is undesirable, we need governance to prevent it from being used. Either way, researchers who want to investigate interventions in the cryosphere, or simply to experiment on a small scale, are paralysed by this lack of governance.
In this respect, the most pressing need is governance for research, setting out ethical principles and processes for research permission. Subsequently, governance for deployment will also become necessary. This need is not universally accepted, however: some argue that research into cryospheric interventions will divert part of an already relatively small research community from its current investment in better understanding the complex interactions of the climate and cryosphere, which is required to provide more robust scenarios of future climate feedbacks and tipping points.
Nonetheless, governance of research into climate interventions is developing fast, particularly regarding solar-radiation modification methods. The European Commission’s Co-CREATE project has identified key lessons in research governance,48 as has the American Geophysical Union.49 However, it is crucial to consider the specific intervention being proposed and the scale of the research, for example indoor research versus large-scale field experiments. Public engagement is absolutely vital to the governance of such research. It improves the quality and value of research, minimises harm to local communities through co-design of experiments, and helps to avoid public backlash. Likewise, Indigenous rights must be upheld by following decolonial research guidelines.
Furthermore, some existing frameworks are relevant, offering a patchwork of partial governance. The Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) is an international treaty that prohibits hostile uses of environmental modification. It was developed after the Vietnam War, during which the US Operation Popeye used cloud-seeding to create muddy conditions around Ho Chi Minh City. The treaty does not prohibit environmental modification for purposes of stewardship. While it was signed by significant powers including the US, China, and Russia, it is now dormant. Nevertheless, any future governance framework for cryosphere interventions will have to address similar issues of weaponisation and security.50,51
Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a 2010 decision called for caution in conducting any climate geoengineering that could impact biodiversity. This is not legally binding but does indicate that governments are wary of potential harms to biodiversity from climate engineering. The 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter expressly prohibits certain kinds of geoengineering in which nutrients or other chemicals are added to the ocean. Some cryosphere interventions, like the spraying of ice-nucleating proteins onto sea ice, may fall foul of this.
The Antarctic Treaty does not directly discuss geoengineering. However, it does have an environmental protocol, adopted in 1991, which says that any activities conducted on Antarctica should be subject to environmental impact assessments. This is not as powerful an instrument as it might be, because it is the proponent of the activity who performs the assessment and they are not required to adopt modifications proposed by other parties.
Finally, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples calls for free prior informed consent before any measures that may impact Indigenous peoples.
These agreements address some but not all the issues raised by cryosphere interventions. Depending on where one wanted to intervene, and the nature of the intervention, other instruments may also come into play. For example, interventions that affect the high seas would invoke the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
This patchwork of regulations neither explicitly addresses interventions intended to affect the cryosphere nor covers the full range of potential interventions. One major gap is interventions in the upper atmosphere, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere with the aim of reflecting sunlight away from the ground. Under the Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention), countries have sovereignty over their atmosphere, but there is no agreement on where the atmosphere ends and space begins – and in any case, the Outer Space Treaty does not have an environmental component. This means there are few or no guardrails for high-altitude interventions.
Designing new legal instruments will require specifics about the intervention or interventions being proposed, where they would be carried out, and who would be impacted. If the intervention was not limited to one country, there would need to be guidelines for bilateral or regional arrangements. Issues like consent, loss and damage, and compensation would be key – much like the just green transition.
Proponents of interventions often see governance as an enabler: it is something that allows them to do the thing they want to do, provided they obey the rules. But truly effective governance must also be restrictive. It must limit risk and damage, and control environmental impacts. It must manage transboundary issues and assign liability. Ultimately, it must have the power to stop people from doing undesirable things.52
It may be possible to take lessons from other parts of the Earth system. For instance, interventions to protect ocean ecosystems such as coral reefs are being actively explored. However, such comparisons also highlight the likely challenges: in this case, that marine governance systems have not kept pace with the rapid pace of intervention.53 A survey of practitioners revealed that they did not even agree on the climate goals they are pursuing and had given little thought to the broader socio-political consequences of their work.54
A key focus for any governance framework must be Indigenous peoples and other inhabitants of the cryosphere, including future generations, non-human species, and ecosystems.55 The Arctic alone is home to 4.5 million people, whose livelihoods are adapted to and reliant upon the icy conditions.56 The opinions and objections of cryosphere inhabitants must be respected. It is desirable to co-create research into cryosphere interventions with local people, so they can be involved at the outset and throughout.57 Informed consent, given freely and prior to any intervention being enacted, is key. Recovering the cryosphere will require a protracted effort; such measures can be sustained only if engagement has been secured, and trust is maintained, for the long term.
5-year horizon
Strengthening of cryosphere Eco-augmentation interventions as a branch of research, with further development of ethical guidelines and principles of oversight for research. Co-creation of sustainable adaptation strategies for cryosphere changes with immediately affected communities. Systematic review of the value of the cryosphere within the Earth system and to society (intrinsic, instrumental, and relational). Improved understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of the elements of the cryosphere, which can guide interventions.
10-year horizon
Reform of legal policy and planning instruments to make them intervention-ready. Improved protections for the rights of people (including Indigenous peoples, local communities, and future generations) and nature as regards research, governance, and international decision-making. Development of polycentric coordination systems for environmental action – for example, linking decisions on mitigation, adaptation, and climate intervention. Creation and deployment of regulatory governance frameworks specifying that science done in a location should benefit that location and the impacted communities and Indigenous peoples.
25-year horizon
Responsible transformation to build a climate-policy system with integrity: this requires planned future systems, shared moral goals, rights-based co-benefits, and empowered critical publics. Responsible use of cryosphere-derived microbiological knowledge.
