Digital twins: a stepping stone to achieve ocean sustainability?

Abstract

Digital twins, a nascent yet potent computer technology, can substantially advance sustainable ocean management by mitigating overfishing and habitat degradation, modeling, and preventing marine pollution and supporting climate adaptation by safely assessing marine geoengineering alternatives. Concomitantly, digital twins may facilitate multi-party marine spatial planning. However, the potential of this emerging technology for such purposes is underexplored and yet to be realized, with just one notable project entitled European Digital Twins of the Ocean. Here, we consider the promise of digital twins for ocean sustainability across four thematic areas. We further emphasize implementation barriers, namely, data availability and quality, compatibility, and cost. Regarding oceanic data availability, we note the issues of spatial coverage, depth coverage, temporal resolution, and limited data sharing, underpinned, among other factors, by insufficient knowledge of marine processes. Inspired by the prospects of digital twins, and informed by impending difficulties, we propose to improve the availability and quality of data about the oceans, to take measures to ensure data standardization, and to prioritize implementation in areas of high conservation value by following the ‘nested enterprise’ approach.

Towards a fair, reliable, and practical verification framework for Blue Carbon-based CDR

“…In line with the need for a fair and reliable MRV framework, we propose the establishment of a Blue Carbon Ecosystem-Digital Twin (BCE-DT), a single and centrally managed model which represents the global diversity of BCE and their carbon budget(s). DTs are distinguished from traditional modeling approaches by their near real-time synchronization with the observed world, and the application of Artificial Intelligence (Tzachor et al 2023) and Earth System Models (Irrgang et al 2021), with the ability to conduct What-If Scenarios as key attribute. While oversight of this BCE-DT must be at the intergovernmental level, it could be structured similar to the rapidly developing Digital Twin of the Ocean, where insitu data, models, and Artificial Intelligence are integrated for an improved characterization of natural spatial and temporal variability (Pillai et al 2022), adapting to both anthropogenic and natural changes as they occur.…”

“…First, an Artificial Intelligenceenriched Earth-System Model is co-designed with stakeholder input and is integrated into a High-Performance Computing framework. A centralized data repository (termed 'Data Lake' in figure 1) is established as a central part of the BCE-DT, fostering seamless integration of near real-time data (Tzachor et al 2023). The establishment and operation of this BCE-DT system is then internationally-coordinated by the SDO.…”