Destination Earth is a European Commission initiative to develop an ambitious AI-driven decision support system. This is based on a very high precision digital model of the Earth to monitor and simulate natural and human activity, and to develop and test scenarios that would enable more sustainable development, as well as support European environmental policies.
The high-level motivation for the initiative is to advance the European Green Deal and the European Strategy for Data including the objectives of EU Cloud Federation through Destination Earth (DestinE). ESA intends to participate to it by leading the overall effort in collaboration with EUMETSAT and ECMWF.
Destination Earth is intended to unlock the potential of observation, digital modelling and simulation of the Earth’s physical and human components and related phenomena such as climate change and extremes events from global to local scale to support the green transition.
AI will place a key role in this being at the core of data assimilation, unconventional earth system modelling and all reasoning and policy generation aspects. The ESA Φ-lab will coordinate all ESA activities related to AI analytics, reasoning and policies generation exploited to create ‘what if’ user scenarios based on different climate related changes of key parameters. Destination Earth would be implemented in several phases over the next 7 to 10 years. The first phase will focus on the design and the first deployment of the DestinE core Service Platform that will include the first two Digital Twin Earths for Weather-induced and Geophysical Extremes and Climate Change Adaptation.
