When applied globally, PDRC can lower rising temperatures to slow and reverse global warming. Aili et al. concludes that "widescale adoption of radiative cooling could reduce air temperature near the surface, if not the whole atmosphere." To address global warming, PDRCs must be designed "to ensure that the emission is through the atmospheric transparency window and out to space, rather than just to the atmosphere, which would allow for local but not global cooling."
PDRC is not proposed as a standalone solution to global warming, but to be coupled with a global reduction in  emissions and transition off of fossil fuel energy. Otherwise, "the radiative balance will not last long, and the potential financial benefits of mitigation will not fully be realized because of continued ocean acidification, air pollution, and redistribution of biomass" from high remaining levels of atmospheric , as per Munday, who summarized the global implementation of PDRC as follows:The estimated total surface area coverage is 5×10 m or about half the size of the Sahara Desert. Global implementation may be more predictable if distributed in a decentralized manner, rather than in a few heavily centralized locations on the Earth's surface. Mandal et al. refers to this as a "distributed geoengineering" strategy that can mitigate "weather disruptions that may arise from large-scale, centralized geoengineering." Desert climates have the highest radiative cooling potential due to low year-round humidity and cloud cover while tropical climates have a lower cooling potential due to the presence of humidity and cloud cover.
Total costs for global implementation have been estimated at $1.25 to $2.5 trillion or about 3% of global GDP, with probable reductions in price at scale. This has been described as "a small investment compared to the estimated $20 trillion global benefits predicted by limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C," as per Munday. Low-cost scalable materials have been developed for widescale implementation, although some challenges toward commercialization remain.
Some studies have recommended efforts to focus on maximizing the solar reflectance or albedo of surfaces from very low values to high values, so long as a thermal emittance of at least 90% can be achieved. For example, while the albedo of an urban rooftop may be 0.2, increasing reflectivity to 0.9 is far more impactful than increasing an already reflective surface to be more reflective, such as from 0.9 to 0.97.