Backed by £81m, this programme aims to enhance our climate change response by developing an early warning system for tipping points.
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.
Additional context for this programme
Applicant resources
About ARIA funding
If you require accessible documents, please contact clarifications@aria.org.uk
Will design an affordable, sustainable and just sensing system that addresses our unmet observational needs in harsh environments
Will deploy existing and new sensing systems in a coordinated multi-year field campaign, targeted at the Greenland Ice Sheet and Subpolar Gyre
Will unlock mathematical, physical and computational methods necessary to characterise tipping point dynamics, the subsequent impacts and economic consequences of crossing tipping points
This solicitation seeks R&D Creators, which are individuals and teams that ARIA will fund to:
We welcome applications from across academia, industry and national laboratories. We are keen to engage and support individuals who have not previously worked in climate science, but are excited to pivot their work to a new field.
We’ve also launched a teaming tool to help potential Creators form teams to collaborate and produce a proposal together. Click below to register your interest.
Gemma Bale and Sarah Bohndiek are biomedical physicists working as co-Programme Directors. They both joined ARIA from the University of Cambridge, where Gemma continues to lead teams working on non-invasive brain monitoring, and Sarah in optical imaging technology for earlier cancer detection.