What we know about the secretive government agency planning to dim the sun - as experts warn of 'unwanted' consequences
Most people probably haven’t heard of Aria – the secretive UK government agency funding efforts to dim the sun. Aria, or the 'Advanced Research and Invention Agency', has allocated £57 million for so-called 'geoengineering' projects that aim to slow global warming.
One of these projects is Marine Cloud Brightening, which involves ships spraying saltwater into the sky to enhance the reflectivity of low-lying clouds.
The salt will force water droplets in the clouds to come together or 'coalesce', which will make them more reflective and stop so much sunlight reaching Earth.
Ilan Gur, chief executive of Aria, said: 'In climate change, we’re essentially in a race against time in terms of the consequential, potentially devastating changes to the planet.'
But some experts have warned that such outdoor experiments – which are due to begin in the next five years – could have 'unwanted side-effects'.
So, you may be wondering – who, exactly, are Aria and where does their money come from?
Read on to find out more about the public-funded agency, which is spending£4.1 million a year on wages for its staff alone.
Aria, a research funding agency of the UK government, aims to 'unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone'.
'We empower scientists and engineers to pursue research that is too speculative, too hard, or too interdisciplinary to pursue elsewhere,’ it says on its website.
The research agency was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief aide, and was set up in 2021 by ex-Tory business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng.
The body, based in London, has been given a staggering £800 million budget – of taxpayers’ cash – to go towards 'high-risk, high-reward' scientific research.
As Aria states on its website, other research projects it is supporting include programmable plants that remove move CO2 and smarter robot bodies that 'ease the labour challenges of tomorrow'.
Ilan Gur, the chief executive, is being paid around £450,000 annually, The Telegraph reports – three times more than the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile Antonia Jenkinson, the chief finance officer, takes home around £215,000 and Pippy James, the chief product officer, around £175,000.
In total, Aria is blowing £4.1 million a year on wages despite having just 37 staff, with the top four staff at the company pocketing nearly £1 million of taxpayers’ cash each year between them.
When it was first set up Mr Cummings laid out his vision for the research agency, telling the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee that Aria must have ‘extreme freedom’ from the ‘horrific bureaucracy’ of Whitehall.
One committee member, Katherine Fletcher MP, said that this proposed lack of oversight made Aria vulnerable to capture by the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’ offering unusual and potentially transformative research, which was never likely to succeed.
Questions have also been raised about their willingness to share information.
A report, published in March this year by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), showed that Aria had received a Freedom of Information (FOI) request seeking information about its ‘Scoping Our Planet’ project.
The request had come from online newsletter ‘Democracy for Sale’, which had asked for information regarding who had been funded under the project, which seeks to support schemes to ‘fill the gaps in Earth system measurement to respond confidently to the climate crisis’
Aria responded by stating that it did not consider the requested information to be ‘environmental information’.
Following a complaint to the ICO, the initial request was upheld and the information was provided.
The ICO’s report reads: ‘The Commissioner agrees that there is public interest in Aria being transparent about the projects which it is funding.’
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