Geographical Magazine The EU announces plans to build Destination Earth, a digital twin of our planet 2021 Attempts to build a digital twin of the Earth could lead to the democratisation of climate and environmental data The European Union, as part of a huge investment into digital infrastructure and supercomputing, has announced plans to build a ‘digital twin’ of the Earth. Destination Earth, or DestinE, will pull in an unprecedented amount of real-time data from climate, atmospheric, meteorological and behavioural sensors to construct a high-precision model of the planet. By rendering the Earth’s atmosphere to a one-kilometre scale, DestinE’s supercomputing capacity will go far beyond today’s modelling infrastructure. Europe’s current climate forecasting model, led by ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) runs at the comparatively coarse scale of nine kilometres. ‘DestinE aims to develop a very high precision model of the Earth to anticipate, monitor, better understand and react to the climate change challenges ahead of us,’ says Johannes Bahrke, European Commission spokesperson for the digital economy. It’s hoped that this digital twin will give policymakers the computing power necessary to gauge how climate change will impact society and at the same time to visualise how the decisions we make as a society could alter the trajectory of climate change.