£1m funding to help forecast climate tipping points

An Edinburgh researcher has been awarded £1m to develop new ways to forecast when Earth’s climate systems may cross critical tipping points.

Aerial image of cars floating in flooded city streets

Professor Víctor Elvira of the School of Mathematics will lead the project to investigate and forecast tipping points that, once reached, could lead to cascading and irreversible changes to Earth’s climate.

The project, called PROTECT, will develop new methods in statistics, signal processing and AI to forecast and understand these tipping points, and to quantify uncertainties about them.

Severe impacts

Previous research has shown that major parts of the Earth system are at risk of crossing climate tipping points within the next century, with severe consequences for biodiversity, food security, agriculture and humanity.

For example, if polar temperatures keep rising, ice sheets will melt rapidly, causing sea levels to rise. This will also thaw permafrost, releasing greenhouse gases that will further accelerate climate change, including even more rapid thawing of ice sheets.

Many of these tipping points are part of complex and interconnected systems that makes their early warning signs hard to predict. 

Climate programme

Funding for the Edinburgh project is part of a five-year £81 million programme by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA). 

The initiative will fund 27 international research projects to work collaboratively to create an early warning system for tipping points.

ARIA is a new UK Government agency that backs high-risk, high-reward research projects. 

Understanding climate tipping points is crucial for anticipating irreversible changes. This project advances computational methods for detecting and predicting these tipping points, with a strong emphasis on scientific understanding. We also focus on quantifying our uncertainties about the future — not just predicting what can be predicted, but also determining what cannot and why.

Related links

School of Mathematics

ARIA

Image credit: Unsplash/Evelyn Geissler

Tags

2025
Climate and Environmental Crisis
Data, Digital and AI