Pillar 6: *Driving the future of modelling*
Modelling is critical to mitigating and adapting to environmental change. We will continue to capitalise on digital developments to significantly enhance our modelling capability in three areas.
The first of these areas relates to digital twins (see more information in the section on ‘setting the agenda’). We are building digital twins that realise synergies between process understanding and data understanding. This is a significant driver for a step change in modelling capabilities, taking advantage of the unprecedented availability of data to better capture environmental processes and their behaviours at a given site, scale and at a given time.
Secondly, we will continue to employ software engineering principles to improve the code base of our often-complex models, allowing them to be more flexible and extensible, including the ability to inject new or alternative processes or behaviours into models as our scientific understanding grows.
Finally, we are building models which are coupled in a more principled way through an integrated modelling framework, featuring built in support for model coupling.
Example: SPEED projectionsThe SPEED (Spatially explicit projections of environmental drivers) project has driven forward the field of scenario development related to complex, inter-related models. For the first time, it provides a set of spatially explicit scenarios covering multiple pressures – social, economic, climate change, land use change, and pollution – that are internally consistent, and consistent with the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) community global scenario framework. The outputs empower researchers, consultants, agencies, and governments to better-mange the environment of the future, and to reduce the risk of unintended consequences of interventions. An example of the early adoption of outputs from SPEED is Reading University’s study of pollinator futures and the fate of bees. UKCEH also worked with BEIS to envisage possible futures that help to frame activities such as achieving net zero, conserving the environment, and developing agriculture.
