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A digital twin of Earth for the green transition

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 80–83 (2021)Cite this article

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For its green transition, the EU plans to fund the development of digital twins of Earth. For these twins to be more than big data atlases, they must create a qualitatively new Earth system simulation and observation capability using a methodological framework responsible for exceptional advances in numerical weather prediction.

A key element of the Green Deal is its dependence on the ‘digital transformation’ — an openly accessible and interoperable European dataspace as a central hub for informed decision making. The EU identified two landmark actions to support the necessary information systems: GreenData4All2 and Destination Earth3. Whereas GreenData4All will develop the European approach to discover, manage and exploit geospatial information, Destination Earth aims to construct highly accurate models, or ‘digital twins’, of the Earth to monitor and predict environmental change and human impact in support of sustainable development. Aligned with the new Digital Europe funding programme4, Destination Earth is expected to start in 2021, and the first, high-priority digital twins serving extremes prediction and climate change adaptation will start production in 2023 (ref. 5).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Schrader for her graphical assistance.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Research Department, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK

    Peter Bauer

  2. Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Bjorn Stevens

  3. Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Wilco Hazeleger

Authors
  1. Peter Bauer
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  2. Bjorn Stevens
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  3. Wilco Hazeleger
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Contributions

P.B. conceived the Comment and P.B., B.S. and W.H. contributed to the writing and revision of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Bauer.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Antje Weisheimer and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Bauer, P., Stevens, B. & Hazeleger, W. A digital twin of Earth for the green transition. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 80–83 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-00986-y

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