Dealing With the Inter-disciplinarity of Climate Change, Food Security and Energy Alternatives: Some Indian Initiatives

Abstract

In association with the impact on forests, the major impacts of climate change in India would be
 on the land-surface and ground water hydrology and the agricultural food-production. The critical ecological
 challenge in future will be whether the available natural resources are sufficiently available to support food
 production as well as to generate ecosystem services. There already is a significant pressure on ecosystems
 because of continuously increasing population and extensive land use changes. Sustainable use of land and
 water resources requires that these scarce resources be appropriately allocated among various competing
 human activities. World-over, there is a realization now that climate change research calls for a multi
disciplinary and integrated approach. Moreover, it becomes important that at local and regional scales
 mechanisms of GHG- interactions with water, light, nutrients and temperature should be investigated, and
 the effects integrated in such a fashion as to quantify the cumulative impact of GHG- increase. This article,
 inter alia, focuses on the above-mentioned issues and delineates some of the activities related to the research
 being carried out in India. Some of the worth-mentioning recent research activities in India pertain to the
 quantification of environmental water demand (EWD), methane emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs,
 investigations into the inter-dependencies between bio-geochemical cycling and climatic perturbations, linkages
 between food-crisis, ecological foot-printing, ecological risk assessment and ecological economics.