Forecasting Tipping Points: Uniting climate measurements and models to create an early warning system

Why this programme

Major parts of the Earth system are at risk of crossing climate tipping points within the next century, with severe consequences for biodiversity, food security, agriculture, and humanity. Despite the potential impact, we're poorly equipped to characterise the long-term trends of our climate systems, or predict the future risk of runaway, self-perpetuating change. Our best observational datasets are at a nascent stage, while our best climate models are computationally expensive and do not capture all the physical processes we need.

What we're shooting for

Combining expertise in observation and modelling with innovative sensing systems, we'll look to develop a proof-of-concept for an early warning system for climate tipping points that is affordable, sustainable and justified. We'll achieve this through a targeted deployment of low-cost sensing systems, to be tested in a multi-year field campaign, whose data can be integrated with advances in physics- and AI-driven models to push the frontiers of knowledge for climate tipping points.

By unifying these approaches, we're aiming to confidently predict when a system will tip, what the consequences be, and how quickly that change will unfold.Our goal: to create an early warning system for tipping points that equips the world with the information we need to build resilience and accelerate proactive climate adaptation.