Building ARIA's Accelerated Adaptation Programme for Impact
Session Description
This session (also the starting point of a working group) introduced ARIA's new Accelerated Adaptation programme, aimed at helping wild species adapt to environmental change faster than natural evolution allows, then opened the floor to a direct question: if the science works, what else needs to happen over the next four years to turn that scientific success into real-world impact? Programme Director Janek walked through how ARIA funds high-risk science differently from traditional grant bodies, then asked attendees what evidence investors need, how the programme should stay accountable to the community, and what would de-risk support for deploying help to wild species in practice.
Speakers
Yannick Wurm, Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
ARIA (the Advanced Research and Invention Agency) is a three-year-old UK research funding body set up by an act of Parliament, designed to fund long-term, high-risk scientific bets that don't fit within traditional grant funding.
ARIA organises its funding around individual Programme Directors, each responsible for a specific "opportunity space," an area of science seen as neglected relative to its potential importance, where new funding and people could unlock real progress.
Unlike most funding bodies, ARIA decisions are made by individual Programme Directors rather than committees, and ARIA signs contracts with clear milestones rather than issuing grants, actively managing funded teams with check-ins roughly every three months.
ARIA takes no equity in the organisations it funds and provides 100% of funding itself, no co-funding with other investors, and deploys most of its money within the UK.
Yannick Wurm's own opportunity space focuses on nature. His reasoning: species extinction rates are already rising sharply even before major climate impacts hit, with roughly a quarter of plant and animal species now at risk of extinction over the next hundred years, and the tools available for humanity's relationship with nature remain far less intentional or advanced than tools used in fields like medicine or engineering.
Yannick Wurm described the current state of nature intervention as "palliative care", we know how to reduce pressures on ecosystems, but lack the more targeted, faster-acting tools available in other fields, and that gap is what his ARIA programme aims to address.
The programme's approach starts narrow: fund teams to help a single species overcome a single environmental stressor, using that as a proof of concept before generalising the approach to other species and stressors, eventually incorporating AI and robotics to scale cost-efficiency.
A worked example Yannick Wurm gave: English oak trees, a keystone species supporting roughly 2,000 dependent species, may not be able to reproduce in the southern UK as summers get drier. One proposed intervention involves growing saplings under simulated future climate conditions, identifying which genetic traits allow survival, and using that insight either to select resilient trees or to develop treatments for trees already growing.
Yannick Wurm was direct about the ethical dimensions: safety measures include running all work indoors under contained conditions during the four-year programme, and requiring funded teams to take ownership of the ethical implications of their work from the outset, rather than treating it as a separate add-on.
Asked whether nature, left alone, can simply recover on its own, Yannick Wurm said he's become convinced that existing environmental pressures have created too much momentum for that to happen without additional intervention, even if all stressors stopped today.
On funding mechanics: a recent seed funding call (grants up to £500K) drew 260 proposals in a short window, of which Yannick Wurm funded 16, more than his original target of 10, but still, in his own words, a low success rate given the effort applicants put in. The next full programme funding call is expected in roughly 18 months.
Yannick Wurm closed the session by posing ARIA's open questions directly to the room, including what evidence VCs need before funding deployment of these interventions, what level of scientific validation should come before investment, how often ARIA should update the community on progress, and what would most de-risk support for eventually deploying help to wild species in the real world.
