Destination Earth: Creating the Planet's Digital Twin

The biggest computers in the world is something we require and very big computing creates lots of data. And we have to find good methods to extract the relevant information from these vast amounts of data and do that quickly. Welcome to this special English edition of der Gorsche Neustadt, a German podcast series by Zabila Barton, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who, inspired by the World Economic Forum's great reset initiative, are committed to making our world smarter, greener and fairer. Today I welcome Dr. Peter Bauer, the Director of Destination Earth, the European Union's flagship initiative to create a digital replica of our entire planet. This replica is a high-position digital model of the Earth, a digital twin, in fact. It is a pillar of the EU's Green Deal to tackle climate change and it is meant to provide pinpoint evidence-based support to enable all member states to implement the green transformation. By 2030 and at the cost of 7 billion euros, a full digital replica of Earth and all its resources is expected to have been achieved. Welcome Dr. Peter Bauer in Bonn. How does it feel to be in charge of such a gigantic project? Well, thank you very much and thanks for inviting me and for giving me this platform to discuss Destination Earth with you. It's good that we have an hour and I think it will give us a bit of time to discuss the big science challenges that we're trying to solve, the big technology aspects that we're trying to use to solve the science aspects and what this project is about and how it's organized. I think your first question is really on the point because it's a very big project. It needs a lot of partners and therefore it feels like quite a challenge actually because you have to make sure that the money that's being invested is invested well. There's a lot of pressure, of course, for a society to deal with climate change and weather extremes in a responsible way. What we're proposing here is an entirely new information system that is serving like Green Deal policies and investments at grand European scale. It feels very exciting but it also feels like a gigantic challenge with lots of responsibilities. And because you talked about the Green Deal and so on, Destination Earth, you got apparently, according to your website, eight more years and you will present the replica of the entire Earth system. So how was the idea born and what is the status quo? Well, the project has a bit of history and we have to qualify statements like a replica of the entire Earth system. So indeed Destination Earth has a lifetime. The expectation right now is altogether maybe seven to 10 years. It depends a bit on the progress and as you know, policies change, expectations change. We will discover new things and maybe solve some things faster. Others we may discover will take a little longer. So maybe seven to 10 years for the entire program is a good estimate. And of course, we don't go away with the money and come back after 10 years and say, look, this is what it is. And then people like it or not. It's an evolution. We take a lot of people along the process and of course, we are already under pressure to deliver some first demonstrations actually in two years. So Destination Earth is cut into phases. And the first phase that we got funded by the European Commission now is two and a half years. We signed about nine months ago in mid-December last year and the first phase is going to finish in mid-2024. And by that time, the European Commission expects already some of the demonstrations of these new capabilities. And we probably have to talk about what a digital twin is, because the digital twin framework sits at the heart of Destination Earth. And with this comes this what you mentioned, the replica of the entire Earth system. So the idea was born, or at least parts of it, probably more than 10 years ago, where you say, what I really need as an information system or at the core of an information system that helps me make decisions. Decisions like, how do I structure or restructure my farming in Europe in the future in a different way so that I take into account how climate will change, how water availability will change, what kind of political boundary conditions and financial boundary conditions I might have, or how the energy supply market is going to change, or how do I protect infrastructures from extremes in the future. And these are questions we're all dealing with, looking at the recent evolution of climate change-driven extremes and their impacts on society. It's in everybody's face, basically. Something needs to happen, and we need a good information system for guiding decisions like that. And at the core of this sits, of course, a simulation system that allows you to reproduce in the best possible way what's going out there. So you want to have a good climate prediction system, a good system for predicting extremes and what the impact of that is on food, on water, on health in the future. So that's what we do. In parts that exist already, because we do climate predictions today, we do weather forecasting today. So some of the components exist already, and this is also why we, as the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in the UK, Italy and Germany, as the world leader in weather predictions sit at the core, or one of the three core parts of destination Earth. So you want to pick up the pieces from that, but you want to make them much, much, much better. So you take your Opel Astra and you design the Formula 1 car from that. So it needs to be better and faster and more fuel efficient and can do more things. But then what you want as well, you don't want to stop at predicting rainfall. You want to turn rainfall into flood risk and into energy efficiency, if it's about wind, for example, or irrigation needs when it comes to food. So you want to tie these components to the description of a physical system. And then you actually want to create an interactive system like an app where you say, and now I can use that information, that is so much better, it's so much more connected with what matters to us. And I actually want to play with it. I want to say, if I'm a politician and I care about flood protection in the Netherlands, can I play with different kind of solutions for how to make flood protection safer in the future or more cost effective? What are my options actually? And what kind of scenarios I can play through to design my decisions? And this is what we talk about when we mean digital twins. This nation is made of so many different aspects and they're all interconnected. Could you just summarize the main aims of the program? Yeah, so when we say digital twins, digital twins promise like three breakthroughs. So it's really three points we have to focus on. And the important thing is we need the three together. So number one is more realistic models and a better way of, that's simulation models, like a think of the earth system like a virtual reality game where you want to simulate everything that's out there in the most realistic way. So it's like reality almost. And we want to make this really, really good and accurate. We need good observations for this and good simulation models. So that's number one. Number two is we want to drive this connection from the physical system, so rainfall, temperature, flood waves and stuff into the human system, into how we manage food, water, health, risks, energy, this kind of thing. So translate the physical system into the human system. And number three is that interactivity that I mentioned earlier that allows you to play. I have that system now, but how do I, can I influence it and how can I change my options in it? So I actually understand what a more effective or more cheap, almost sustainable option for energy or water or food management is. So these three things together. You represent as the director the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast as you said, and your research institute that normally delivers weather predictions to the member states. So who else is on board and who is doing what? Yes. So we are an international organization. There's two other international organizations as partners in destination earth with us. One is the European Space Agency. So they are, they, what they usually do is they, they build satellites, they launch the satellites and operate some of these satellites. So they, their expertise is in earth observation and the technology for that. The third partner is the European Meteorological Satellite Agency, UMEDSAT. And they, they do not really build satellites, but they operate satellites and they turn satellite information into, into information that we require, for example, at WF. And so this triangle of technology and science and operational expertise seems quite well suited to deal with the problem of destination earth because it relies on very good simulation capabilities. That's what we do 24 seven, very good earth observation capabilities. That's what the other two do. And all of us have a lot of experience in turning this kind of information into services for the public. That's what we do now. You know, as you say, we serve the weather prediction, national weather prediction service, services with our data. Issa humans are to something similar on their side. And we actually all very good at managing large projects and procuring some of the activities to further partners. But it's the, at the core is us three. But then we're inviting through funding additional partners that will implement and operate some of the components that we, that we design. And can you mention some of the additional partners? Yes, we have, we have national med services in Europe, for example, so the German weather services one, we have companies in Italy, we have aerospace industry companies. Very soon, we will have Helmholtz institutes in Germany, for example, like the Alfred Wegmehr Institute. We have, you know, it really goes hydrology companies or hydrology institutes. Universities are part of that. We have in very important areas of digital technologies, high performance, performance computing centers, and also companies who build processes or software, you know, so it really goes across of science, technology and services, what we need to cover. And headquarters is where? So destination Earth, so the European centers headquarters is still in Reading, even though we have now an office in Bonn, and of course offices and our new computer in Bologna. So from us, our responsibility with destination Earth is managed from the Bonn offices. For human sites, it's managed from their main facility in Darmstadt, in Germany, and for the European Space Agency, it's managed from their facility in Fraskati, in Italy. So there's no single, there's no single office for everything. And let's talk about a bit the actual building of a digital twin of the entire Earth system. I think some of the listeners will have experienced already digital twins of other products or factories or processes. But the entire Earth is, of course, a different league. What does it require? What is easy to implement? And of course, what are the obstacles you encounter so far? Well, there's loads. I mean, I guess the appeal is clear, you know, if you have a simulation system that is as realistic as possible, only then, you know, you will actually have the right tool in your hands to think about how to deal with climate change and extremes, for example. So I think the incentive is very clear. But as you said, you know, the Earth system out there is very complicated. You know, we have ocean circulation, we have sea ice, we have the atmosphere, we have the land surfaces, we have vegetation, you know, we may have a volcanic eruption, we have lots of things going on. And to represent all of this to the degree that's required in such a simulation system is very difficult. We have some experience with similar setups in our weather prediction systems and climate prediction systems. But they fall short in many different ways. And that's one of the big challenges coming to this enhanced or in the unreaching this enhanced level of skill and realism. So there's lots of obstacles on the science side. And it's even some obstacles that relate to processes that we don't actually understand very well. You know, so it's very difficult to simulate them if you don't understand them very well. And we only discover them now. So another big source of difficulty is that technology path. So if you, you mentioned, again, the analogy with a video game or, you know, like an Xbox or something, you know, the more realistic your virtual reality game is, the harder it is to compute. And in the end, in your Xbox, in your video game, you have very, very powerful computing, actually, you know, and the progress and the realism and the, you know, the picture quality of these games is has increased so much because of so much more computing in these things. And this is what we need to use for ourselves as well. You know, this is just an Xbox that gives you like a picture where you play in a certain limited, limited world. Imagine you want to do this for the entire earth, you know, the computational overhead of this is just enormous. And it needs to happen quick, you know, so you have to, you can't wait for a simulation to finish in a year. You want to have this done within days, let's say, you know, because you need it. So the computational overhead is huge. But the big computers that are out there are not designed for us, you know, so we have to make sure that our simulation models and the way we use observations actually works on these computers that are available. And then it's not just a matter of, you know, making it work on these computers, but having enough computing and computing is very expensive. You know, the European Commission is at present investing billions into European high performance computing infrastructures over the next years. And each of these systems costs like I think the present generation roughly 250 million each, just to put there. And given electricity costs right now, many, many millions a year to supply with electric power. So if destination earth, you know, creates enough computing needs to fill one of these systems, that's a lot of money. And you want to spend that money, money well. So lots of obstacles around that. But then in the end, you know, we have to create that link between all the information we provide, and actually making that digestible for a politician, a scientist, a decision maker in a local authority, a weather service, you know, a private company that is, I don't know, optimizing the routing of their ships, according to the predictions for the next week, you know, of CIS and currency, these kind of things. So if you think that through, in how many needs you're actually providing for, making that link between the data, the huge amount of data you create for the huge amounts of computing, to that particular information that everybody needs is another big source of challenges. What technology do you actually use to create a digital twin right now? So it's extensions of what we're using right now in our weather forecast in climate prediction businesses, but you know, again, taken up to the Champions League, you know, so the biggest computers in the world is something we require. And very big computing creates lots of data. And we have to find good methods to extract the relevant information from these vast amounts of data and do that quickly. So that requires that you kind of find ways to manage your compute problem and do that fast, and then take that data and extract the information that you require. And if something changes, and you want to play with it, you know, you may have to change something and run it again, you know, and produce new types of data and a lot more data, and you go through the whole process again. So this entire computing, data handling, information extraction, and then change again and configure, reconfigure and change and place breakthrough scenarios, scenarios comes with an enormous software creation challenge, you know, it's like developing the first iPhone, you know, going, you know, so far you have a Nokia phone with a keypad, and you want to develop an iPhone and you say, because I need an entirely different level of interaction. And we're thinking about calling it apps, and you call it, you call an app, you can, you can, you know, use your finger and you tap on it. And all of a sudden, you have an app for energy, you know, and behind that sits a machinery, but you have a very easy way to interface with all the compute and technology that sits somewhere, and that you don't want to worry about. You can just play with the app and say, I want exactly this information. It may take a minute to pick that up. But you can just have that kind of interface. And if you want to change something and say, okay, I need something else, you call another app, you know. So this is kind of what we're looking for at the software development and the technology questions around that, that we need to solve a really, really large. Do you have to, along the way, also develop new technology? Probably on the software side for sure, we will rely when it comes to hardware, so actually, actually like processes or how these big age, high performance computing systems will look. We can probably not influence the design of those. So we will not develop that. So for us, it's primarily a software development exercise. But nonetheless, you know, you need lots of people, lots of very clever people to design these kind of new levels of information systems that we haven't seen yet. And since you mentioned the talent, have you got enough people who are really equipped to do this? Well, yeah, we're trying, you know. The funding for Destination Earth is okay, but not great. So what we have available actually for the first phase of Destination Earth is collectively 60 million per year. So that's for ESA, human-saturnal selves together. So the entire phase one, the two Navias is funded with 150 million euros. A lot of this goes into, you know, also creating the governance structures, administration and kind of things. But of course, a lot of this goes also into finding these signs and technology solutions and finding that talent. So just at ESAWF, for example, we hired now about 55 people. And we hired them within like six to nine months. So it was actually okay finding that talent. But I would say we still haven't reached the critical mass of staff levels in numbers and quality that it altogether needs to solve the big problem, the big question. We have hired great people, no question, but I think we need more of that. And do you limit the hire to Europe? Or do you look elsewhere? We do look, we can look elsewhere. There are certain limitations, but, you know, this is a global problem that needs global solutions and global excellence and limiting ourselves to Europe would be a mistake. There are some limitations, but I can only encourage, you know, if people are really interested in Destination Earth to talk to us, and I'm sure we can find a solution. Which reminds me, I think I read a quote in your papers from Margarita Westsager, the Executive Vice President of the European Commission. And she said, Destination Earth will improve our understanding of climate change and enable solutions at global, regional and local level. How? If you have an information system like this, you know, and you have your apps, you know, and then you can look at global solutions at regional problems or local effects at the same time, you know, and that's very important that you can do this from within the same system. And ideally, of course, you have the best machinery under the hood, you know, the best engine to do all this. So the best quality of climate predictions, the best quality of weather predictions, the best way of translating this into societal impact sectors, so that you can actually trust the information that you get out at global, regional and local level. So it's all about this information system with the best science technology package that we can think of. I forgot one question to ask when you when you talk before about the supercomputer. How big is actually your supercomputer? So we have an ECMWF because we do operational weather prediction. We have a quite good system. It's it's rather big. I don't know if 40 petaflops tells you something. So that's the 40 times 10 to the power of 15 or floating point operations per second. So that's a big big system. In terms of in terms of money, a system like this costs probably something like 80 million euros. And we usually buy these systems for like four year time frame. So that's an investment of like 20 million per year, plus electric power to run it actually. So that's a serious investment. This is what we do at ECMWF at home for weather prediction. And as I mentioned before, destination Earth needs more than that. So we're looking here at the biggest system that Europe is presently implementing in various places. Right now that's happening in three locations. One is in Finland, one is in Italy and the third is in Spain. But there's already plans for even bigger machines in Germany and France. So we want to run destination Earth things and computations on the biggest systems available in Europe. And we have done some of this in America as well. But right now we're focusing on Europe because of the European funding. So, you know, we're looking at the best machines that European money can buy and that we are allowed to use actually. And if we look at the energy crisis at the moment, is that is that a major obstacle for you? It is an issue. It is an issue, of course, because all the budgets that have been devised by the time these systems have been procured and the budgets have been allocated and defined by the European Commission or by us at home, we made assumptions on energy prices at the time. These energy prices are outdated now. So there is an issue. So if energy prices double or triple or even worse, then we have a serious problem because the money for this added cost has to come from somewhere. Otherwise, we will not be using these computers to the extent they were built for. And the other point is, since the world is interconnected, I keep on reading that the programme is for the EU member states. How do you limit that? It's not really a limitation to that as it may read. I think you have to see primarily that this is European Union money that is spent for a European Union system that uses European Union computing. And if we run procurements, for example, where we say we want to run a contract for a technology component or for a simulation model or for a machine learning toolkit somewhere, that that money will be spent within Europe. But by no means is Destination Earth limited to Europe. We're looking already now for partnerships elsewhere. We may not be able to fund them with European money, but there is money actually or there are similar types of programmes. They may only cover certain elements of what we cover with Destination Earth as a whole. But there are parallel ways of thinking in other countries. And it may be actually the best solution to say, let's partner up with you in America or Japan or the UK for that matter. If we agree on the basic concept of Destination Earth, we do the same thing. And what you do, you get your UK funding for. What we do, we use your EU funding for. But together we create basically a joint system. And in the end, all this funding and all our excellence comes together in that joint system. Yeah, for me as an outsider, that makes a lot of sense. How far are they in the US or in Asia? There are components here and there. But you can increase, if you look for, if you Google digital twins at Earth system, you will increasingly see that kind of vocabulary picked up in the US and Asia and similar ideas being floated. We get contacted by NASA. We get contacted by private companies. Private companies see digital twins of the Earth system actually as a huge business opportunity. Imagine you have an information system like this and we used smartphone analogies before. And you know what kind of business opportunities arose as soon as the first smartphone appeared. And what happened then? Imagine you have an information system like this. If a company was the first to have such an information system, there's endless business opportunities associated with that. So actually we have quite strong competition, I'm sure, among the Googles, the Microsofts and you name it. So you see this popping up both on the publicly funded places like NASA I mentioned before or private companies. So you will see a lot more of that in the future at national level, international level and commercial level. Because you talk now about the private companies, clearly they have an interest to create something like that as well. How big is the danger that the big tech companies get together and run a program parallel to governmental programs? There are different ways of seeing this. You could see it as a danger and you could see it as an opportunity. You could say if there are several of these systems and some are publicly run, some are privately run, we have competition. Competition usually helps accelerate progress. So it's difficult to say whether the best possible way is to keep commercial companies away from it or to say only commercial companies will eventually have the financial power and intellectual power to do it. I find that hard to say actually and I believe that we will, based on the heritage that we have and the excellence that we have, we're probably in the best place to start that now. If then aspects of this or maybe copies of that system will be run commercially at some stage, that's probably okay. In the end, the result matters. If we take a step back and move away from dollars and stuff and things, in the end, we need such information systems and as long as these information systems are made available so that politicians can make the right decisions and we can save lives and create sustainable societies, actually don't care where it's run. And I think that matters and as long as that guiding principle can be implemented, I don't care where the solution comes from to be honest. Yeah, I'm quite a supporter of a multi-stakeholder approach. So I would like to see pretty much the idea you were talking about before like merging, not only continents and countries, but of course also the commercial interests so that they're all in one boat, basically turning your project into the United Nations project, not under the rule of the United Nations, but as a global as a global. Can you see? Absolutely, you know, and you know, parts of our motivation papers and speeches, you know, they start with sustainable development goals. And of course, with the idea that whatever we create as an information system creates that information for everybody. So there's no limitation to Europe or a company or something else. So the idea is whatever we create, and that's actually one of the guiding lines, guiding principles of a European Commission here, you know, that the data is freely available for everybody as much as we can, software systems are becoming open and available, you know. And so that this system creates other opportunities, you know. And again, what works here is the mobile phone analogy, you know, we're creating a mobile phone here. And then we leave it to the outside world to create all the apps. And there's no limit, you know. So with that system, you can create whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about the sustainable development goals. As far as I remember, there are 193 countries who already signed up and committed. Wouldn't it make lots of sense that they all be part of it? Yeah, there's different types of being part of it, you know. There is certainly being part of it as recipients or customers of this. And I think, you know, the way we do it, that's fairly straightforward, because, you know, whatever we do will be made available through all the existing channels that United Nations member states already are being served by. Yeah. Then another level of partnership is actually on the solution provider side, not as a customer, but as a solution provider, you know, where you contribute something, you know, computing or software development or whatever. You know, and there, and this we run through the channels that we have, you know, when we run procurements, when we engage in partnerships in the US or Japan or somewhere else over the private company, you know, it really doesn't matter which member state, UN member states coming from as long as we pick the best possible provider and sort it out. Will you create sectoral digital trends, let's say for food, health, heatwaves, water, or is it all one? Well, parts are one, other parts aren't, you know, and that's the beauty of the system, you know. So both, if you take two, just pick two of the whole thing. I'll say water management and energy management, because water and food are probably too close to one another, you know. For both of them, you need a very good physical earth system simulation and observation system so that you actually know how much wind is there, how much waves you're going to have, how much it rains, if there are more droughts or more extreme weather events in one way or another, you know. So that basic physical data set and simulation system is required by both, you know. And then, that's fine, and that's the same for many, many other domains, and that is one system, you don't need two systems for that. And then when you branch out into water-specific questions or energy-specific questions, then you bolt onto that generic physical earth system, specific models and observations and applications that then translate that generic system into the specific questions for water or energy, you know. And there you can play with different options, and maybe there's better models or worse models, and you can compare, you know, and the user can bring in their own data and try that out, you know. So you want to branch out and specialize into water or energy where it is required, and that is not necessarily everywhere. So we want to create that global basis that serves everything, of course. But then we also want to branch out into these individual systems. But the only thing Destination Earth can do with its limited funding is demonstrate that branching out to a certain degree to then say, look, we give you something here. If you want more, you can actually develop this yourself, and we support that as well. But it doesn't mean that Destination Earth, you know, provides a solution for everybody everywhere all the time. Some of it can actually be picked up and funded maybe through a national agency using Destination Earth infrastructures. And then we say, you know, for the Netherlands, actually, we want to do this flood prediction system, or we want to design the next decades worth of energy provision system. And we will use Destination Earth, but we will use our develop our own system on top of that. But we rely on Destination Earth capabilities to serve everything we need that we don't want to reproduce. So it's also a platform for whatever people want to do. If we go through the different professions and companies and so on. For example, I'm the mayor of Paris, and I decided recently, as I did to go pretty much green in the center of Paris, how can Destination Earth help me to do faster and better? So Destination Earth will probably not create the digital twin of Paris. So it's just like your previous question, you know, where you would say, you know, Destination Earth, sorry, you as a mayor of Paris would probably invest in creating a digital twin of Paris, you know, that goes down to street level or building level, you know, where you monitor traffic and you organize traffic or reorganize traffic according to air quality, where you look at flood defenses, if you have extreme rainfall over Paris, where you look at greening options for the future or how buildings are set up in terms of, you know, the most cost effective energy efficient design. That's the question you're concerned about. And I would suggest to you, you create your digital twin of Paris, and then destination, and then you bolt this onto Destination Earth, because you will read reliable information on extremes, you will need reliable information on flooding and future scenarios of how solar insulation could change, of what kind of droughts or heat waves you might expect more, more intense, less, whatever, you know, so all the constraints that you require to design, make your design decisions using your local digital twin of Paris. From Paris to the climate, if I want to understand, for example, the planet's entire carbon cycle, would you be the right address to go to? And if yes, how are you able to help? In parts, Destination Earth is primarily not set up for the carbon cycle. It's an important aspect of the climate system, obviously. The carbon cycle questions are very much related to very long time scales. So we're talking here 100 years or more, because the carbon cycle develops slowly. That's of course the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that applies to the scales that we observe here and where Destination Earth scales are relevant. But if you really want to understand the carbon cycle, I would say you would probably go to more classical, very complex earth system models that are presently run in the climate community, rather than Destination Earth, because Destination Earth focuses more on the next few decades, where the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is important, but representing the correctness of the entire carbon cycle in the earth system is maybe not the most important thing. Since you focus on the next few decades, with the use of all your data, are you able to predict where and how to live safely in the next four, five decades? That could be one of the guiding questions that we would like to answer. Yes, not down to street level, but we certainly want to answer that question in terms of regions, or northern Europe, southern Europe, western Europe, eastern Europe kind of scales, because right now, what present day predictive capabilities provide you do not answer that question at all. They do this quite well when it comes to temperature, so when it's getting warmer or colder. So I'd say the predictions that you have right now for the next five decades or 100 years are probably reliable for warming, but everything that follows, how is circulation going to change, how are rainfall patterns going to change, how are extremes going to change, like extreme rainfall, droughts and heat waves, you cannot take from that data, and this is where Destination Earth comes in. So to a certain degree, and certainly coming to regional reliability and accuracy, I think this is where we want to be. We talked a lot about gathering data and using data. At the end of the day, it's about who is implementing all the change that is needed. Yes, so we can't solve all the EU's problem with data, or the world's problem with data for sure. So we have to look at the needs and provisions of Destination Earth. So we have to come up with a sustainable data handling framework, and that means we need to make sure that the data is interoperable, for example, so that regardless of whether your data is coming from a mobile phone and we're allowed to use it, or from a simulation model that's run in England, or from a satellite observation over the pole, or from, I don't know, a balloon sonned somewhere in China, that all that data is readily available immediately, that it's interoperable, that we know exactly where it's from, what it measures, that we know its accuracy, that we can deal with it in our data handling framework with the same formats, the same metadata information, so the data descriptors that tells us about the character of the data, and all of that. So these are questions that we have to solve. Fortunately, in our community, which is the weather prediction community, we have invested decades in doing stuff like that. We have to step beyond that because we're talking here about really a lot more data, so just the volume is going to change, but the data diversity is also going to change because it's not just weather data like rainfall, for example, it's also data now from farms about soil moisture and irrigation and this kind of thing, and also it's new data sources, diversity volumes are going to increase, so we need to make sure that whatever we developed in our domain that worked very well is extended into these new data sources so we can deal with it. So volume and data rates are a real challenge, so data rates are how much volume per time you create and you want to analyze, and of course urgency is always there, you know. So we need to deal with a lot of data fast, which requires specific data management solutions very close to where a lot of this data is being created, so if we run on very big computers in Europe, you know, you don't want to take a lot of data and move it somewhere else and analyze it elsewhere, you have to make sure that whatever software is using that data and analyzing it is doing it right where it's being produced, so you don't move data because it's inefficient, you know. So all these, and if you do this in three different places but you want to combine the results from these three different places somewhere else, you know, you have to do this heavy analysis where the data is being produced and then transfer only the limited information data sets much smaller to the place where you want to use to combine the things together or merge the data, these kind of things, you know. So you have to come up with very clever and agile concepts to deal with a lot of data, a lot more diverse data and the high data rates and we're developing this right now as we speak and again, it's primarily a software problem. There are some hardware implications, but it's primarily a software problem actually. You went a little into it already. Is the information in 2030, will it be eventually centralized, decentralized, will it be open source, which you probably aim at, will we see kind of a climate action tracker in each European capital and of course, will you be in the metaverse? Yeah, so the data is certainly decentralized. The information that you extract from it is probably also decentralized, depends on who's asking for it. You could say if it's about climate action and the information supporting climate action, like at the policymaker level, you want to see this centralized in a certain place and there are services in place right now with Copernicus, with the European environmental agency, you know, they run platforms where climate action data or supporting data is actually centralized and we don't need to invent new things, we can just place it there. But if you're an energy company or if you, I don't know, somebody else, you may want your data set somewhere else, then we put it somewhere else, but the big data sets will certainly be decentralized, but the information you take from it can be placed wherever it creates the biggest impact. Metaverse is interesting. I used already video game analogies before and I think in parts we actually see ourselves a bit like that. The metaverse is a virtual space that is like or almost like the real world and if you think through what you want to do with digital twins, it's not too different actually. You want to you want to in quotes live or move around in a virtual world that is as realistic as possible, that you can run through a climate change scenario for the next 50 years, let's say in real time, you can just move through it in your metaverse and you can change things, you know, and then you change your flood protection or you change your, I don't know, your renewable energy resourcing and management of future quits or something, and you can do this in your metaverse interactively and your system allows you to do that. So this is the ultimate vision in a way, so the metaverse analogy works, I think for us, but from where we are now to having this, the metaverse for real will take a bit of time, but the analogy is not wrong. You know, so it's a good way of visualizing what we're actually trying to achieve. From your perspective, in 2030, who will be the main beneficiaries of Destination Earth? So I think we are primarily geared at decision makers because, you know, its policy support is the Green Deal, it's a European Commission and the countries, but of course we know it's global, it's United Nations and all that, we've covered this before. So I think this policy making level is very, very important for us and probably the primary customer that we need to serve first. And that is not just national governments, it can also be local or regional governments, we discussed the mayor of Paris. So I think that decision making level that helps our society to become more resilient and more sustainable is the primary customer, but I'm sure there will be so many more applications popping up, we haven't even thought of, but I think we need to certainly serve that decision maker level. You went briefly before we came to the end, just two more questions. Briefly before, who will be also part of the broader business at the end? And that is probably completely unlimited and we can't even imagine what will happen. How is your capacity of when you deliver the data and so on to give government guidance on how to change, how to behave, how to access the right technology to implement change? Well, because they will have a better information system that they personally don't have. As I've said, it's better information, it's the link to societal sectors that they're concerned about and spend money on and all of this in the interactive framework. And this is what they need. And they will make better decisions with that. I have no doubt because the quality of the information is better and it's a new quality of interacting with information. So, you know. Well, let's hope then we have also a very good quality of politicians who want to make the change and to want to implement the change. How optimistic are you that we will eventually fix the planet? Well, fixing comes with a funny connotation, you know, because you could say I want to revert change. So, I've engineered a change now into the world because we emitted enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases. So, we engineered something and we changed landscapes and whatnot, you know. So, we already fixed something in the wrong direction. So, should we now fix it in the other direction and apply other types of engineering to take back what we've done, you know. I think most of the scientists I know are very united in saying that's probably not the right way of doing it because it's such a complicated system. Some of the things we did are irreversible. You may, and it's very nonlinear system. So, if you apply yet another change, it may go off in the wrong direction. So, it's not just a, you know, like I do this and if I revert what I've done, it goes back to the initial stage. It's not that simple, you know. So, if we mean this with fixing, then I say don't fix it, you know. So, the best possible way is of course, one, to reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions as fast as possible, to stop the running away process, the runaway process that we started. That's certainly one way of fixing it. And I'm not sure it's up to destination earth to accelerate that process. Destination earth will certainly help you, you know, create a better message. But I think, you know, reducing these emissions is number one priority and that's the only way. But destination earth will certainly help you create measures for how to adapt to the change that you will have in any case, you know. So, there will be climate change. There is already climate change now. It will help you predict futures, possible futures more accurately or more reliably and therefore design better actions to just adapt to the change that will happen and that we will face, you know. But, you know, I just hope that all of this creates more awareness of the climate urgency and that the first point I wanted to make, you know, reduce carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions in the first place hits home more, you know, and that governments and people, individuals realize that we're all part of this. We all have to change our way of life. Yeah, I think you summarized that very well here. And I can only thank you a lot for taking time and talking to us and going a bit into detail what is actually happening here, what the green deal means in detail, what kind of products we have already in Europe and destination earth is certainly a flagship project here. And yeah, I wish you best of luck and really thanks for having you. Yes, thanks so much for the invitation and the opportunity. You've been listening to a special English edition of De Gorsa Neustadt, a German podcast series by Zibylla Baden, in which she talks to pioneering leaders who are committed to making our world smarter, greener and fairer. For more information, please visit www.zibyllabaden.com and the official site of the World Economic Forum.