Next phase of Climate Resilience Demonstrator announced

The National Digital Twin programme’s Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) project has announced a second phase which will build on its initial success showing the value of connected digital twins in tackling the effects of climate change.

The team​ aims to further develop the methodologies and outputs created in the first phase of CReDo, which produced a series of outputs demonstrating the benefits of connected digital twins in providing greater adaptation and resilience potential across power, water and telecoms infrastructure networks in extreme weather conditions. The first phase of the project, which comes to a close at the end of March, wrapped up with a public webinar on 2 March 2022, attended by over 240 participants, featuring presentations and interviews with the technical development team, funders and asset owners.​

As part of the National Digital Twin programme’s portfolio of projects, the second phase of CReDo will transition from the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) to an Industry/Catapult partnership housed at the Connected Places Catapult (CPC). The project is marking the move into its next phase, managed by Connected Places Catapult (CPC), with a series of outputs that will share key findings, benefits, lessons learned and the technical approach to this first-of-its-kind collaboration.

The Climate Resilience Demonstrator is funded by UK Research and Innovation, the University of Cambridge and the Connected Places Catapult.

Discussing the urgency for collaboration through connected digital twins, Sarah Hayes, Head of the CReDo project, said: 

“The risks arising from failing to adapt to climate change are huge. CReDo seeks to mitigate these risks by increasing our understanding of infrastructure interdependencies and the future impact of interventions to increase resilience. The CReDo team have worked incredibly hard to lay the foundations for increasing infrastructure system resilience. It is the skills of our people, supported by new technologies, which will take forward our capability to tackle climate change through connected digital twins.”

Pointing to the potential for this work to have a positive impact, Mark Enzer, Head of the National Digital Twin programme, said: 

“In a wonderfully tangible and relevant way, CReDo has shown the value of enabling secure information flow across sector boundaries. But this should be just the beginning. The idea of connecting digital twins must be extended to other sectors and other use cases – not only in addressing climate change, but wherever we need to understand systems better and intervene more effectively. I believe in CReDo!”

​Tom Collingwood, STFC Hartree Centre added:

“There is huge potential for connected digital twins to benefit industry and society in terms of damage prevention, cost savings and service reliability, not just for the immediate services like telecoms, energy, water and utilities – but these also cascade down to any industry – or person – that relies heavily on or would be affected by disruption to those services.”

Yalena Coleman of CPC said, “Integrated infrastructure is a key strategic focus area for Connected Places Catapult, and we will be investing in further phases of CReDo, working together with partners to take forward the key learnings from this phase. We will ensure the learnings are shared with the wider community and across other relevant initiatives like the Digital Connectivity Infrastructure Accelerator, National Underground Asset Register and others; and link up industry, academia and government thinking in this area.”

Find out more about CReDo:

All of the reports, webinars, demos and other outputs the Digital Twin Hub, where they continue to contribute to public good.​