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Many countries are blessed with internal and external security problems, constant conflicts leading towards loss of life and habitat, pervasion of chronic issues of hunger, poverty, lack of basic health facilities marred by void of education and human rights. In this context, the climate change is emerging as an issue of concern to all members of diverse societies, cultures, citizenships loaded with narrow differences and also having lot of similarities to share due to the common ecology and physical borders of those societies and countries.
To understand the processes of Climate Change, it requires a new holistic ‘paradigm shift’ in our thinking. When language of threats arising out of climate change is going through the prism of real, urgent and dangerous; the meaning reflected by these words have acquired definite meaning in the parlance of scientific evidence through consistent evolution of international consensus.
Lead originally by initiative of Indian Academy of Sciences and considering the importance of reliable science input on Climate Change for policy framework generated by The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in the past on climate change research, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) has set up a national Centre for Climate Change Research (CCCR) at IITM to address all science issues of Climate Change relevant to the regional climate. Centre could be seen at the link ‘CCCR’ of the Institute’s website: http://www.tropmet.res.in
The CCCR is a grant-in-aid Program at IITM as part of a larger National Program on Global and Regional Climate Change launched by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. India. IITM, Pune, an autonomous Institute under the MoES functioning as a leading research centre in applied and fundamental aspects of ocean-land-atmosphere interaction in tropics is searching for reputed scientists for senior scientific positions at different levels for its newly launched Centre for Climate Change
The Program will involve attribution and projection of regional monsoon climate using regional as well as high resolution global coupled models. R & D activity is planned to do whatever is needed to reduce the uncertainty in the attributions and projections. The Centre is envisioned to be a world centre of excellence with all the necessary physical and computing infrastructure as well as adequate human resources and will provide state-of-the-art work environment for scientists. Research (CCCR) at Pune.
The indicators reflecting the significance of the research in various variables are already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which contemporary society and economy have developed and thrived. Indicators include a) Global mean surface temperature, b)Sea level rise, c)Global ocean temperature, d) Arctic sea rise extent, e)Ocean acidification, f) Extreme climatic events. The Scientific expertise which CCRA is seeking to advance research in Climate Change in the areas of (i) Physical Processes, (ii) Climate Modelling, (iii) Climate Scenarios Development, (iv) Impact Assessment, and (v) Observed Changes and Data Products.
Studies of physical processes include improving various components of the global and regional models and ultimately the simulation of regional climate. In Climate Modeling the key issues will be development of coupled Ocean-Atmosphere, modeling strategy under different climate change scenarios, assessment of uncertainties in monsoon under climate change scenarios, assessment of the relative roles of aerosols and GHGs on Indian Monsoon, development of modeling set up to undertake various sensitivity studies and outstanding issues relevant to climate change and palaeoclimate modeling studies to identify climate analogues in the past for the estimate of future evolution of climate.
Forecasting constitutes crucial part of mitigating crisis which can occur due to extreme events of climate change. In this respect CCRA will try to establish fresh perspectives about Climate Scenarios Development. The chief objectives of it will be a) to generate an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate change scenarios to be utilized by several groups in the country that are involved with impact assessment and development of adaptation and mitigation policies and methodologies by running several global and regional climate models with different GHG scenarios for more than a century and b) to evaluate and develop suitable downscaling methodologies for developing tailor made climate change data products for the users in the country and the region.
India is lacking in informed studies of Impacts Assessments to convince the global community that country is equally vulnerable to the threats of dynamic changes in the ecosystem. Therefore, to examine the impact of climate change on some important sectors such as the water resources with a special emphasis on the Himalayan river systems, agriculture, human health etc new studies have been initiated. These studies will be done at the centre itself as well as in joint collaboration with other groups in the country.
The current crisis of climate change is arrived not only due to production of the GHGs in recent times but also due to long lasting accumulation of the GHGs since many decades. Because of the long life of Carbon Di Oxide, Methane, Nitrus Oxide and HFCs, PFCs, SF6 the accumulated concentration of the GHGs is causing cumulative impact on the environment. The world is having very small window of opportunity as far as mitigation and adaptation is concerned. If the consensus arrived around 2 degree Celsius is to be materialized then world must stop the concentration of CO2 upto 450 ppm. Right now the world has concentration of CO2 around 430 ppm. Regarding Observed Changes and Data Products the capacities to be developed in CCRA include following areas: (i) Monitoring, source identification of various GHGs, (ii) Aerosols; space time variability, chemical composition etc., (iii) Monitoring and assessing land use and land cover changes, and (iv) Palaeoclimate reconstruction using various proxies.
New ambitious mechanism of diffusion of technology must be developed in order to facilitate the developing countries for strengthening their hands in mitigating the damage being done by climate change. This mere access of technology will not solve the problem of the enhancing the mitigation efforts. There is urgent need to develop capacity building institutions in the developing countries, improved financial mechanisms, and whole set of development initiatives to improve the adaptable techniques to incorporate the modern technologies. Before moving in this direction, rigorous research in versatile aspects of fundamental sciences of climate change is very essential.
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