Stories of the future: Harnessing the power of Digital Twins
Helmholtz EU Event - Brussels, 23 September 2024
Powerful digital technologies, in particular Artificial Intelligence, will have a profound impact on sustainability research. For the first time, we can now build sophisticated digital models for different compartments of the earth system. The aim is to employ effective tools to support decision making to address environmental challengesand to explore optimised pathways towards a sustainable way of living.
Let us discuss how exactly they will help to shape our future in the Earth and Environment domain: What observational data and tools do we need for Digital Twins? What role will Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models play in their development?
What are Digital Twins?
A Digital Twin of the Earth is an information system that exposes users to a digital replication of the state and temporal evolution of the Earth system constrained by available observations and the laws of physics.
Digital Twins can help to regionalize and visualize possible future scenarios depending on human actions. As such they can guide development options and spatial planning to future-proof the intertwined human and environmental systems. Digital Twins answer ‘what if’ questions.
The synthesis paper Digital Twins of Planet Earth provides an overview of research on digital twins in the Helmholtz research field Earth & Environment. The newest version can be downloaded here.
Digital Twins in the research field "Earth and Environment"
In the following, we present Digital Twin EU projects from Helmholtz Centres, starting with 3 lighthouse examples for "Stories of the future":
The Helmholtz EU projects show the broad variety of Digital Twins - please find more of them here: