Destination Earth

Destination Earth (DestinE) is a European Commission initiative to build digital twins of the Earth system for monitoring and simulating natural phenomena, hazards and human activity. It is implemented by three entrusted entities under DG Connect: ECMWF builds the Digital Twin Engine and the first two twins, ESA runs the service platform that users enter through, and EUMETSAT runs the data lake that joins the twins' output with Copernicus and other data.

The two twins so far are the Climate Change Adaptation twin, which runs multi-decadal simulations, and the Weather-induced Extremes twin, at high resolution. Both can produce "storylines": replaying a recorded heatwave or flood and showing how it would unfold in, say, a two-degree warmer world. The intended users are national and European public authorities, meteorological and hydrological services among them; pilot services on the platform include one for perennial-crop farmers and one for solar and wind assessment.

The initiative launched in 2021. ECMWF reported on 30 June 2026 that the twins and the engine were operationalised in phase two and that phase three, running to June 2028, will operate them on EuroHPC systems, link the twins more closely, couple machine-learning components into a European AI Earth-system model, and turn twin output into AI-ready datasets.