Climate change is one of the biggest challenges looming over humanity, its effects becoming increasingly visible. Storms, droughts, floods, and fires have become more frequent, global systems are changing, and rapid urbanization, the industrial revolution, and the emission of greenhouse gases are leading the world to catastrophic consequences. 

Bill Gates summarized the kind of damage climate change will inflict as “To understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period”. 

Thus, the need of the hour is to more advanced and effective ways to predict, analyze, assess, and mitigate the crucially unavoidable climate change impacts, a technology like AI.

AI is a disruptive paradigm that has tremendous potential to predict, analyze, and mitigate the risk of climate change via the efficient use of data, algorithms, and sensing devices. The calculation, prediction, and decision-making capacities of AI can be exploited to develop effective models of environmental monitoring and weather forecasting. 

The European Twin Agency (ESA) has leaped forward to leverage this potential of AI for addressing the issue of climate change. It is working on a ‘digital twin’ of the Earth to understand the planet’s past, present, and future, and forecast extreme, climate change events. Launched at the Agency’s 2020 Φ-week event, this Digital Twin would be the Earth’s dynamic, digital doppelganger in the virtual space, erected via AI and quantum computing.

According to ESA scientists, “this digital model will help humanity to “monitor the health of the planet,” as well as simulate the effects of human behavior on the environment”. 

Constantly fed with the Earth’s observation data, coupled with in situ measurements and AI, the Digital Twin will help forecast and visualize natural as well as human activity on the planet. It will monitor the health of the Earth, identify patterns in its weather systems, perform simulations of the planet’s interconnected systems, and begin making accurate predictions. 

“Machine learning and artificial intelligence could improve the realism and efficiency of the Digital Twin Earth—especially for extreme weather events and numerical forecast models,” said Florence Rabier, Director General, European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

The ESA scientists plan to evolve the digital planet over the next decade and have already launched several Precursor Activities to explore the main technical and scientific challenges in building it. Covering Forest, Hydrology, Antarctica, Food Systems, Ocean, and Climate Hot Spots, each activity addressed a different challenge and the role of AI as well as other stakeholders.

“In addition to predicting weather events, the model would help humanity address the urgent challenges and targets in the Green Deal; a set of policies aimed at making Europe climate neutral in 2050. This would be great because extreme weather events are already kind of the norm. And they are terrifying”, the scientists said at the event.

It would be interesting to see how the model unfolds and how competent it will be in exploring climate change. Getting there won’t be easy. Let’s wait and witness how the Digital Earth exascale the climatic models and supports the planet's sustainability.