EarthGenerator project kicks off in Brussels: building the future of Earth system modelling

On 15–16 June 2026, partners of the EarthGenerator project gathered in Brussels for the official Kick-off Meeting, marking the beginning of an ambitious four-year collaboration funded under the Horizon Europe program.

During the first day, the meeting hosted by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) brought together researchers and experts across Europe to align on the project’s scientific vision, implementation roadmap, community engagement activities, and priorities for the first year of work.

EarthGenerator aims to develop a next-generation Foundation Model of the Earth system, extending the capabilities pioneered by the WeatherGenerator and HClimRep initiatives. By combining advances in artificial intelligence, Earth system science, and high-performance computing, the project seeks to transform the way we understand and anticipate complex interactions within our changing planet.

Unlike traditional modelling approaches designed for specific tasks, EarthGenerator adopts the foundation-model paradigm. The model will be pre-trained on a broad range of Earth system data and subsequently adapted to multiple downstream applications with minimal additional training. This approach enables knowledge gained in one context to support others without retraining from scratch.

Over the next four years (June 2026 – May 2030), the consortium will work towards four interconnected objectives:

• Data – bringing together leading Earth system datasets, including observations, analyses, reanalyses, and model outputs, to investigate links between climate, environmental processes, society, and the economy;

• Model – extending WeatherGenerator towards longer lead times and additional Earth system components through advanced representation learning on Europe's pre-exascale and exascale EuroHPC infrastructures;

• Applications – validating and applying the model across scales, from global to regional, addressing topics such as atmospheric and oceanic extremes, the land carbon cycle, food security, and human migration;

• Community – fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange to maximize the project's impact and support the adoption of its tools by users and organizations across Europe.

Coordinated by the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC), EarthGenerator brings together 13 institutions from 9 different countries, including research centres, meteorological services, universities, and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This broad partnership combines expertise from across disciplines and sectors to address some of the most pressing challenges in understanding and anticipating Earth system dynamics.

The Earth System Data Exploration (ESDE) group plays a key role in data collection, curation, and provision and is also a strong partner in the core model development. One of the tasks of ESDE researchers will be to design an approach to incorporate the radiative impacts of short-lived climate-forcing gases and aerosols into the EarthGenerator model. ESDE also supports project dissemination and outreach.

On the second day, participants joined up to five breakout groups to discuss bottlenecks in research, data provision, and scientific computing infrastructure, while exploring ways to maximise impact, facilitate data sharing, and build long lasting communities.

The discussion initiated during these two days in Brussels are only the beginning of a shared effort to develop open, impactful and scientifically sound AI tools for understanding Earth system dynamics. As the project progresses, the ESDE team looks forward to contributing to this collaborative task and sharing future milestones with the broader community.