Earth Science Strategy for a Rapidly Changing System: The Potential Role of an End-to-End Digital Twin

An ambitious strategy is required to contribute, from an Earth science perspective to the effort of tackling the challenges due to climate change impacts. The strategy should aim at delivering accurate actionable information at relevant temporal and spatial scales, to a wide spectrum of users and stakeholders to inform decisions, actions, policy and risk assessment activities at the local, regional and global levels. The implementation of this strategy will require a few things to be effective: first, to be reliable and scientifically sound, the strategy should comprehensively account for the interconnected nature of the Earth system and the cascading and overlapping impacts of the different environmental and societal processes. This is in addition to the pre-requisite of being based on rigorous scientific understanding of the phenomenology. This comprehensiveness will insure that information provided for a particular action or decision (or policy) is generated by a system that inherently accounts for potential ramifications in other fields. Indeed, providing information for specific objectives should be done with full awareness of potential unintended consequences of that action. Second, this strategy will also have to embrace a broad and inclusive partnership approach with many players across disciplines and across sectors. Third, it will require the leveraging of an arsenal of modern tools and technologies to facilitate the execution. In particular, the approach should be able to provide the mechanisms to leverage existing and upcoming space missions for their global coverage, the integration of vast amounts of scientific data from all sources, capturing knowledge into modeling capabilities and leveraging these for enhanced prediction skills. This will allow creating linkages which will generate information and tools, essential to supporting society’s wellbeing and resilience. The Digital Twin (DT) technology, developed to simulate real-World situations to optimize their design, testing and scenario simulation, has been demonstrated recently to be applicable to environmental science. This technology, combined with recent fulgurant advances of Artificial Intelligence techniques, could therefore potentially play a significant role in simulating, for the first time, the entire Earth system in a rapidly changing environment. If implemented, we argue that it will help us conduct, in a comprehensive fashion, the sensitivity studies required in order to design, optimize and adapt solutions, actions, decisions and policies that will be critical to tackle the challenges of global change. Having a digital replica of the entire Earth system that can mimic the current state of the physical world, with an ability to predict future states, and with proper connections to specialized DTs (for designing cities, factories, roads, etc) will both reduce risk and significantly accelerate the solution-finding processes and the optimizing of the decisions and policies required. This includes strategies for climate adaptation, mitigation, and intervention. This paper aims at presenting a vision for this end-to-end capability and the role DT could play in achieving it. We discuss elements essential to designing such capability, as well as highlight a few challenges and opportunities.