India must prepare for rapid climate change, says top official
Secretary to ministry of earth sciences M. Ravichandran was addressing the National Conference on Polar Sciences (NCPS), organised by National Centre for Polar and Oceanic Research
Panaji: India still has some way to go in coming to terms with the consequences of rapidly changing climate trends, secretary to the ministry of earth sciences M. Ravichandran said.
Addressing the gathering at the National Conference on Polar Sciences (NCPS), organised by the Goa-based National Centre for Polar and Oceanic Research, Ravichandran said, “When we are in 2047, that is the decade the polar region will be in a very disturbed state in many aspects. In the Himalayas, day by day the ecosystem, as well as the water storage, is depleting. Two billion people depend on the Himalayan glaciers, Himalayan water. In Antarctica, there are geopolitical challenges as well as the ice is calving rapidly. We have to think about how we are planning to cope up with all these changes.”
Ravichandran said India needs to focus on research that will help with climate resilience.
“We need to study about glacier melt, and more and more disasters and hazards are there in the Himalayan region. Rain, landslides, floods and many other things are happening in a cascading way. So we need to understand this system better. For that, what we need to monitor and what we need to do is science for resilience, and have some disaster-related systems in place in the Himalayan region,” he added.
Keynote speaker and president of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Gary Wilson said that it is “really important for us to recognise... the pace of change in Antarctica is accelerating.”
“This change is not just rapid loss of ice and increase in sea level around the world, but also changes to ocean circulation, changes to atmospheric circulation and the impacts of those changes on iconic Antarctic species, such as penguins, but also further into the terrestrial environment,” Wilson adde.
The NCPS is a biennial national conference on polar sciences, which brings together scientists from across the country to discuss research covering the three poles — the North Pole, South Pole, and the Himalayas — considered the third pole for being the third-largest reservoir of ice and freshwater after the two poles.
