His wife asks if he's sure. He shows her the screen. Under the 2029 SRM Governance Protocol, if any frontline community invokes veto authority and provides technical justification, deployment stops unless proposing nations demonstrate regional impacts fall below the 5% threshold. The wealthy nations can appeal to the independent Scientific Assessment Panel, which includes representatives from every region with veto authority. Its decisions require consensus.
They blocked it. The framework actually worked.
The Protocol emerged after UNEA-6 collapsed without consensus in 2024, though the collapse didn't produce the chaos some predicted. By 2029, mounting pressure from frontline nations, concerns about liability, and the threat of fragmented regional regulations convinced even the U.S. and China that frameworks beat unilateral deployment. The Protocol borrowed from the Montreal Protocol's architecture: differentiated responsibilities, a multilateral fund providing $400 million annually for affected communities to build technical capacity, and explicit veto authority for frontline regions over any deployment that modeling showed would alter their climate patterns by more than 5%.
Frontline communities received funding to conduct independent analysis and explicit veto authority over deployments affecting their regions—making technical capacity meaningful by pairing it with decision-making power.
The Inuit technical working group received $2.3 million over three years. They hired atmospheric scientists, traditional knowledge experts, legal advisors. They ran their own modeling, interviewed elders about historical weather patterns, documented how spring rainfall shifts cascade through ecosystems that food security depends on. When the wealthy nations proposed SAI deployment, both assessments acknowledged temperature reduction benefits. The Inuit assessment showed those benefits would destabilize predictable seasons. Spring rainfall timing would shift 2-3 weeks, enough to disrupt caribou migration routes communities have followed for generations.
The advisor remembers the videoconference three days ago. Vanuatu's representative spoke first. Their technical team found the proposed SAI would reduce tropical cyclone intensity by 15%, which sounds beneficial until you calculate it would also reduce wet season rainfall by 8%, threatening freshwater supplies across low-lying atolls. "We spent three years building capacity to evaluate this technology on our terms. The modeling is clear. This deployment protects wealthy nations' infrastructure. It destabilizes our water security."
The African Union's technical staff added that their assessment found SAI would reduce Sahel rainfall by 6-12%, affecting 200 million people dependent on rainfed agriculture. "The Protocol gave us resources to conduct real analysis, to develop our own conclusions."
Communities exercised authority. The deployment stopped.
By 6am, the advisor is at his desk planning next year's research priorities. The multilateral fund disbursement arrived overnight—another $2.3 million for continued monitoring, because the wealthy nations will keep proposing and communities will keep assessing. This time the proposals will need to address the concerns frontline communities documented. The framework requires it.
His daughter, home from university for the summer, asks what he's working on. He explains that the wealthy nations will return with modified proposals: different injection latitudes, alternative aerosols, approaches that might reduce regional impacts below the 5% threshold. "They have to prove it to us first. They have to show their solutions don't create our problems."
She asks if he thinks they'll find a version that works. He doesn't know. An approach that reduces global temperatures without destabilizing Arctic precipitation patterns might exist. Or it might not. Communities have authority to evaluate each proposal, resources to conduct independent analysis, and power to say no.
Later, he walks down to the harbor. The sun won't rise for three hours, and the ice is forming later than it used to, thinner than his father remembers. The climate is still changing. SAI might have slowed it. The Protocol gave communities something they needed: authority to determine which solutions serve their needs and which ones solve someone else's problem by creating new ones.
He thinks about his grandmother, who taught him which weather patterns to trust, which ice conditions meant safe travel, which seasonal shifts signaled changes in caribou migration. She understood that knowledge about the land belongs to the people who live on it. The Protocol codified her understanding: communities who live with consequences should control the decisions.
The framework holds because the structure required it to hold. The institutions delivered because they had to. And when his daughter asks if the framework will keep working, he can honestly say: it worked this time. Communities had resources, conducted analysis, exercised authority, and deployment stopped.
He opens the research file and starts planning. The work continues. This time, communities control the terms.