ARIA announces £143m in R&D funding to enhance global climate resilience

The Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) recently announced the launch of two new programmes: Forecasting Tipping Points, led by Programme Directors Gemma Bale and Sarah Bohndiek, and Synthetic Plants, led by Programme Director Angie Burnett. As with all ARIA programmes, Programme Directors have worked with the R&D community to identify areas which are under-explored, under-funded and hold potential to catalyse significant social and economic returns.

Forecasting Tipping Points

Through this programme, ARIA will direct £81 million towards creating an early warning system for climate tipping points, equipping the international community with the critical information needed to build resilience and accelerate proactive climate adaptation.

“Major parts of the Earth system are at risk of crossing climate tipping points within the next century, potentially exposing half a billion people to annual flooding events, and triggering severe repercussions for our biodiversity and food security” says Gemma Bale, ARIA Programme Director. “Recent technological advances, particularly in low-cost sensing technologies, present a major opportunity for transforming our understanding of the long-term trends of these systems and predicting their future risk of runaway, self-perpetuating change.”

Over the next five years, ARIA will fund multidisciplinary teams, pushing the frontiers of climate modelling and low-cost measurement technologies to address knowledge gaps in important climate tipping systems. The programme comprises three deeply connected Technical Areas, focusing on designing affordable and sustainable sensing systems, testing these out in a coordinated multi-year field campaign, and unlocking the mathematical, physical and computational methods necessary to create a trustworthy and accurate early warning system.

“Finding early warning signals for climate tipping points is like searching for a needle in a haystack. We aren’t yet able to robustly identify these warnings amidst the overwhelming complexity and noise in data from our natural systems,” says Sarah Bohndiek, ARIA Programme Director. “This programme aims to reshape our observational capabilities, combining sensing technologies with AI, to develop a system that can confidently predict when a system might tip and what the consequences would be, to allow us to prepare accordingly.”

Synthetic Plants

This programme aims to unite researchers working in synthetic biology and plant biology to research pathways towards a new generation of major crops which are more productive and resilient to environmental stress, pests, and pathogens. With a budget of £62.4 million over five years, ARIA will seek to build synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts that are viable in living plants, moving beyond today’s cutting-edge breeding and crop engineering capabilities to imbue plants with new functionalities.

“Representing eighty percent of the world’s biomass, with scope to provide everything from food to pharmaceuticals, plants are a critical lever for addressing the dual challenges of sustainable food supply and climate change,” explains Angie Burnett, ARIA Programme Director. “From CRISPR therapeutics to the advent of personalised genomics, synthetic biology is revolutionising healthcare. By applying similar advances to plants, we hope to accelerate agricultural innovation, reduce water use, protect crop yields, and address global food security challenges.”

Through Synthetic Plants, ARIA will fund projects carried out by researchers in academia, public R&D and industry, working in varied fields from genetics to systems biology. The programme will be split into five Technical Areas, with an initial focus on designing and building synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts, and exploring the social and ethical considerations around these technologies.

“These programmes reflect ARIA’s mission to pursue edge-of-the-possible scientific capabilities that would be invaluable for the future of the UK and society,” says Ilan Gur, ARIA CEO. “Climate change is causing major disruptions to the world’s most essential natural and societal systems. These efforts will spark the new multidisciplinary communities, research paradigms and technological capabilities we’ll need to ensure a thriving future for the planet and its population.”

About ARIA

ARIA is an R&D funding agency created to unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. Created by an Act of Parliament, and sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, we fund teams of scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible.