UK Invests £81 Million in Climate Catastrophe Warning System

UK 'moonshot' agency to splash £81M on warning system for climate catastrophes

ARIA has opened proposal calls for the world's first early warning system of climate tipping points The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is allocating £81mn to a new programme that aims to create early warning systems for climate tipping points. These are thresholds within the Earth's climate ecosystem, which -- if crossed -- can trigger devastating and often irreversible changes. As no early warning mechanisms currently exist, ARIA is hoping for a scientific first. It has opened calls for proposals to R&D teams across academia and industry, from universities and private labs to startups and SMEs. "Finding early warning signals for climate tipping points is like searching for a needle in a haystack," said Sarah Bohndiek, programme director at ARIA. The five-year-long programme, called Forecasting Tipping Points, will focus on two particular tipping points. One is the Greenland Ice Sheet, which covers 1.7 million square kilometres in the Arctic. It has been retreating alarmingly over the last four decades, contributing to rising sea levels. If it melts completely, global sea levels would rise by about 7 metres. The other is the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, an oceanic current that carries relatively warm water along the coast of Norway and helps maintain a moderate climate in northern Europe. The increasing weakening of the gyre could lead to lower temperatures in the region. ARIA will support teams across three different technical areas: Interested teams can submit their concept papers by September 23. "This programme aims to reshape our observational capabilities, combining sensing technologies with AI," Bohndiek said. The vision is to develop an early warning system that can "confidently predict" when a tip will occur, and its potential consequences, allowing for timely interventions. ARIA is directing a further £62.4mn to explore sustainable agriculture practices with synthetic biology. The dedicated programme, dubbed Synthetic Plants, aims to develop synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts that are viable in a living plant. The goal is to imbue plants with new functionalities, ranging from increased resilience to environmental stress and pests to reduced use of water. The programme will also last for five years. Funding for the first three will focus on the following two areas: The call for proposals is also open to teams from both academia and industry. Interested candidates can submit applications by September 25.

The UK is building an alarm system for climate tipping points

A climate tipping point is a threshold beyond which certain ecosystems or planetary processes begin to shift from one stable state to another, triggering dramatic and often self-reinforcing changes in the climate system. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will announce today that it's seeking proposals to work on systems for two related climate tipping points. One is the accelerating melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea levels dramatically. The other is the weakening of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, a huge current rotating counterclockwise south of Greenland that may have played a role in triggering the Little Ice Age around the 14th century. The goal of the five-year program will be to reduce scientific uncertainty about when these events could occur, how they would affect the planet and the species on it, and over what period those effects might develop and persist. In the end, ARIA hopes to deliver a proof of concept demonstrating that early warning systems can be "affordable, sustainable, and justified." No such dedicated system exists today, though there's considerable research being done to better understand the likelihood and consequences of surpassing these and other climate tipping points. Sarah Bohndiek, a program director for the tipping points research program, says we underappreciate the possibility that crossing these points could significantly accelerate the effects of climate change and increase the dangers, possibly within the next few decades. By developing an early warning system, "we might be able to change the way that we think about climate change and think about our preparedness for it," says Bohndiek, a professor of biomedical physics at the University of Cambridge. ARIA intends to support teams that will work toward three goals: developing low-cost sensors that can withstand harsh environments and provide more precise and needed data about the conditions of these systems; deploying those and other sensing technologies to create "an observational network to monitor these tipping systems"; and building computer models that harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up "subtle early warning signs of tipping" in the data. But observers stress that designing precise early warning systems for either system would be no simple feat and might not be possible anytime soon. Not only do scientists have limited understanding of these systems, but the data on how they've behaved in the past is patchy and noisy, and setting up extensive monitoring tools in these environments is expensive and cumbersome. Still, there's wide agreement that we need to better understand these systems and the risks that the world may face. It is clear that the tipping of either of these systems could have huge effects on Earth and its inhabitants. As the world warmed in recent decades, trillions of tons of ice melted off the Greenland Ice Sheet, pouring fresh water into the North Atlantic, pushing up ocean levels, and reducing the amount of heat that the snow and ice reflected back into space.