British ‘Moonshot’ company invests £81 million in local weather catastrophe warning system

The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is providing £81 million for a new programme aimed at creating early warning systems for climate tipping points.

These are threshold values ​​in the Earth's climate ecosystem, which, if exceeded, can trigger devastating and often irreversible changes.

Since there are currently no early warning mechanisms, ARIA is hoping for a scientific first. It has launched a call for research and development teams from academia and industry, from universities and private laboratories to startups and SMEs.

“Finding early warning signals for climate tipping points is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Sarah Bohndiek, program director at ARIA.

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The five-year program, titled “Forecasting Tipping Points,” will focus on two specific tipping points.

One example is the Greenland ice sheet, which covers 1.7 million square kilometers of the Arctic. It has declined at an alarming rate over the past four decades and is contributing to sea level rise. If it melts completely, global sea levels would rise by about 7 meters.

The other is the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, an ocean current that carries relatively warm water along the coast of Norway and helps maintain a temperate climate in northern Europe. The increasing weakening of the gyre could lead to lower temperatures in the region.

Towards the development of early warning systems

ARIA supports teams in three different technical areas:

• The development of new sensor tools that can meet previously unmet observation needs
• The use of new and existing sensor technologies to create a surveillance observation network
• The development of computer models for the creation and testing of early warning systems

Interested teams can submit their concept papers by September 23rd.

“This program aims to redesign our observation capabilities by combining sensor technologies with AI,” said Bohndiek. The vision is to develop an early warning system that can “reliably predict” when an accident will occur and what its potential consequences will be in order to intervene in time.

Further call for funding for next-generation crops

ARIA is providing a further £62.4 million to research sustainable agricultural practices using synthetic biology.

The special program, called “Synthetic Plants,” aims to develop synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts that are viable in living plants. The goal is to endow plants with new functions ranging from increased resistance to environmental stresses and pests to reduced water consumption.

The program is also designed to last for five years. In the first three years, funding will focus on the following two areas:

• Design and production of synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts
• Investigating the social and ethical aspects of these technologies

The call for proposals is also open to teams from science and industry. Interested parties can submit their applications by September 25th.