Environment and Sustainability

What is a Grand Challenge?

The Turing’s grand challenges form a key part of the Turing’s five-year strategy, Turing 2.0. Our new challenge-led approach to research aims to tackle some of the most pressing societal and ecological problems by using our in-house expertise and bringing together data scientists, researchers and end-to-end users from academia, NGOs, government, and industry to seek the solutions.  

How are we addressing the Environment and Sustainability grand challenge?

 
We focus on problems around modelling and high-precision forecasting of complex environmental systems.  

Environmental and sustainability datasets come in all shapes and sizes, from traces of past climates buried in rocks and ice to live sensor data, satellite imagery, and the outputs of complex computer simulations. We harness insights from these different datasets, and fuse multi-modal data together to best effect to monitor, understand and predict future change and impact. Our researchers will develop state-of-the-art machine learning tools and digital workflows for environmental monitoring and forecasting across a range of complex environmental systems, such as weather, sea ice, and oceans.

What makes the Turing’s approach different?  

We believe that truly interdisciplinary research will catalyse the next step change in environment and sustainability innovation. Delivering this change will require us to break down silos and foster strong lasting collaborations to create diverse teams capable of co-designing and co-delivering solutions. The Turing’s expertise in developing new tools and applying data science and AI across a broad range of science and engineering disciplines makes it uniquely placed to play a central role in the transformation. What’s more, no single institute is as well-equipped to drive forward the development of robust, open-source and community-led AI algorithms, data science and digital pipelines to solve real-world problems. Democratising the use of the tools is vital to safeguard the future of our planet.