NERC Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Environmental Science

Support for UK teams and individuals to address complex environmental challenges through innovative environmental science research using AI and data science in new ways.

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has issued the Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Environmental Science call to fund bold, innovative ideas with the potential to shape the future of environmental science by using AI and data science in new ways to address complex environmental challenges facing the UK and beyond.

The investment will be in two phases:

1. Phase one (current call) will support relatively small pump-priming activities, with high levels of innovation, adventure and risk. Proposals are strongly encouraged from consortia that are able to traverse different disciplinary boundaries in order to develop and apply AI and data science approaches to tackling environmental challenges.
2. Phase two will be a closed funding opportunity and only projects funded in phase one will be invited to apply. The most promising projects (based on the transformative nature of what has been achieved to date and ability to deliver maximum impact with more funding) will receive further investment for an additional 42 months to continue.

The objectives of the scheme are to:

• Develop AI and data science approaches to deliver high quality and trustworthy AI-ready environmental datasets.
• Support novel AI and data science capability and techniques in the areas of ‘data analysis, modelling and prediction’ and ‘digitally enabled decisions’ to support breakthroughs in approaches to tackle significant environmental challenges facing the UK and beyond.
• Establish interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary communities to leverage expertise and techniques across different areas of science and research to stimulate innovative approaches, in line with user needs.

NERC is investing up to £12 million over five years for research and innovation projects to develop creative and novel approaches to the use of data science and AI to tackle complex environmental challenges in the three areas of: environmental hazards and human health; terrestrial ecology; and oceans and climate. Applications that do not address environmental challenges in one or more of the three areas are not within the scope of this funding opportunity. It is anticipated that the assessment process will be designed to deliver a balanced portfolio of investments across the three areas, and across a range of novel AI and data science approaches.

Approaches could include hybrid models, multi-modal models, foundation models and small language models. Outcomes may include high-quality AI-ready datasets, more effective quantification/management of uncertainty/risk, more efficient/less carbon-intensive approaches to modelling, new insights into complex systems, novel approaches to simulation/prediction/forecasting, optimised solutions to resource allocation problems and trustworthy new decision-support tools to enable timely mitigation/adaptation measures.

NERC is seeking creative and potentially unconventional ways of working, rather than incremental development. At the same time, NERC is open to activities across the technology readiness levels (TRLs), from the development of novel algorithms to the application of an established technology from another domain to address a key environmental challenge.