Funding

ARIA is backing the Accelerated Adaptation programme with up to £54m over four years. The programme funds interdisciplinary teams developing approaches to accelerating adaptation in wild species, modelling impacts of interventions, and exploring ethical and governance implications.

The Phase 1 call is now closed — see the funded projects. A further funding call for TA2 (Scaling) is expected in 2028, when Phase 2 of the programme begins.

Technical Areas

• TA1 Systems: Demonstrate accelerated adaptation in specific systems (species, ecosystems, ecological functions).
• TA2 Scaling: Scale the technical capabilities of the tools developed by the system-focused teams to apply to multiple systems.
• TA3 Modelling: Model which species, traits and interventions produce disproportionate ecosystem resilience gains, and quantify risks.
• TA4 Data + analytics: Ensure that claims made by system-focused teams are independently checked and make results comparable, trusted and legible.
• TA5 Ethics + social responsibility: Assess whether, when, where and how there is a defensible hierarchy of intervention acceptability; co-develop ethics and social responsibility tools, frameworks and training; and produce evidence to inform future governance and regulatory pathways.

Eligibility

The Phase 1 call invited applications from interdisciplinary teams bridging fields including ecology, evolution, biological engineering, conservation, ethics, robotics, and AI. Applicants could be from universities, research institutes, non-profits, startups, companies, or individuals based in the UK or abroad. We expect future calls to be similarly broad.