TWINE Demonstrators: Digital Twins for Environmental Science

Support to produce a digital twin pilot project that uses Earth Observation (EO) data and emerging digital twinning technologies to transform environmental science in the priority areas of climate change, biodiversity and ecosystems, and natural hazards.

The TWINE Demonstrators: Digital Twins for Environmental Science call is being delivered by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in conjunction with the Met Office as part of the Twinning Capability for the Natural Environment (TWINE) programme. TWINE is part of a £200 million portfolio of 17 Earth Observation Investment Package (EOIP) projects, which were announced in November 2022. Funding is available to deliver a digital twin pilot project that demonstrates how environmental science can be transformed by research using Earth Observation (EO) data and emerging digital twinning technologies.

The aims of the TWINE programme, and the projects that are successful through this funding opportunity, are to:

• Harness the UK’s leading position at the nexus of environmental, observational and computational sciences, and bring together multidisciplinary teams to realise the value of digital twinning technology to address environmental challenges.
• Improve the understanding, modelling and prediction of events, inform future decision-making, and test the impacts of different scenarios and interventions to help make better decisions on improving the environment.
• Build the foundations of a coherent and lasting landscape of digital twins for environmental science, with a high level of cross-fertilisation of learning and a focus on design for interoperability with current and future activities.

All applications must be developed to address all three of the aims of the TWINE programme.

Pilot projects funded through this call must address at least one of the following three priority areas:

• Climate change, mitigations and adaptation.
• Biodiversity and ecosystems.
• Natural hazards, including weather, and their mitigation.

Projects will form part of the wider TWINE programme and contribute to developing a federated cyber-physical infrastructure ecosystem. In terms of project outputs, successful applicants must compile a report documenting learning from the project and produce evidence pieces which will be used in the communication and dissemination of the project findings.