Climate change research is set to receive a boost with the Royal Norwegian Embassy giving a grant of Rs 14 crore to city-based environment research institute and think-tank, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). ATREE is also to get a Rs 5 crore corpus from philanthropist Rohini Nilekani.
“The infusion of new resources will enhance ATREE’s work on climate change, biodiversity conservation, and environmental governance and policies,” said Kamal Bawa, ATREE president. The cooperation with Norwegians will also strengthen ATREE’s doctoral programme that seeks to build human resources in sustainability science. “ATREE has a unique doctoral programme. Funding from the Norwegian government will provide fellowship support to doctoral students,” said Ganesan Balachander, ATREE director.
The ATREE programme will look primarily at four themes: ecosystems and global change; ecosystem services; land, water and livelihoods; and, forests and governance. The project will also support 40 India PhD students to undertake interdisciplinary research in the field of sustainability. Funds have been earmarked to build a 10,000 sq ft of additional office space, and strengthen the exisiting Eco-informatics library which houses the India Biodiversity Portal team.
The Norwegian grant will also enable faculty and student exchanges between Norwegian research institutes and ATREE. Norway's ambassador to India, Eivind S Homme on Tuesday launched the ATREE-RNE collaboration at the trust's head office. A group of researchers from Norway —from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Norwegian Institute for Nature Research; Natural History Museum, University of Oslo— were present to explore collaboration possibilities with ATREE scientists.
Research institute ATREE’s initial focus was on people-friendly biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale. It has now expanded to include ecosystem services, forest governance and, more recently, water resources management. ATREE works primarily in the hotspots of the Western Ghats and eastern Himalayas.
According to Bawa, "Climate change is a major new environmental phenomenon confronting south Asia today. ATREE’s work has expanded to include impact side of climate change in all four areas. This includes impact of climate change on amphibian habitats and on phenology of forests, on hydrological processes in forested catchments, and on water stress in rapidly urbanising basins. Climate change impact and adaptation is thus a cross-cutting theme in ATREE’s work."
ATREE now proposes to develop a more comprehensive programme on climate change by including mitigation through reductions in GHG-emissions. This is a particularly vexing and challenging question to address in the south Asian context, where the current level of per capita emissions is low and the need for poverty alleviation is high, and the conventional strategy for poverty alleviation depends upon increasing throughputs of fossil fuels and other mineral resources through industrialisation, which leads to a high growth rate of total emissions.
The Royal Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi cooperates with India on a range of environmental issues like climate change adaptation, climate modelling, clean energy, biodiversity conservation, earth quake risk reduction, and management of hazardous waste. It has collabrated earlier too with ATREE.
