How much change in distribution of demography and agricultural crop types will take place in temperate and tropical regions due to climate change considering present rate of consumption of resources? What are those safer regions which will be the most favorite destinations of migrants affected by global warming, vulnerable events and ground water depletion?

The increasing consumption of earth resources like fossil fuel, mining, pumping out ground water etc. is creating disturbances inside earth and in earth’s atmosphere. These disturbances in earth systems will attract vulnerable events like earthquakes, tsunami, cyclones etc. Regions prone to these vulnerable events will be devastated which will force people to migrate to safer places.

On the other hand, due to global warming and melting of ice, regions like Scandinavia and Russia will get more agricultural land and greenery. This will attract migration of people towards northern parts of these countries. Even people from other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia may shift towards these areas in due course of time. Another factor affecting migration will be sinking of islands due to sea level rise.

Depletion of ground water will also be major factor affecting migration to other places within region or in some cases out of the region (if severity increases). In tropical region like south Asia, glaciers are melting; rivers are not having enough water to recharge the ground water. The uncertainty of monsoon rains is increasing. The rain water is not properly trapped to recharge the ground water, most of it goes as run off. Very soon in these regions, conditions will be so that people will be forced to leave agriculture and migrate to some other places. This will also affect the agricultural patterns and population distribution.

I believe that during next decade, we must focus our research to search the answers of these questions in order to prepare future generation ready against natural and man made disasters. One of the steps of action may be to develop multidisciplinary programs and teams of scientists and modelers including social scientists, political scientists, geophysicists, ecologists and atmospheric and agricultural scientists etc.

Is Passive Management Approach still practical for Managing Biodiversity in a Changing Climate within Least Developed Countries?

Most of the least developed countries are managing their biodiversity using passive management approaches; leaving nature to take its own course. With the climate variability, extremes and change species are suffering from extreme and persistent droughts, floods, wildfires etc. Seconded by the increasing population of people who also depend on climate-sensitive sectors (farming, fishing, pastoralism) the situation in worse. Following crop failures, massive death of livestock etc, people are relying directly on the biodiversity resources closer to their areas as well as from further away. The increasing population is also leaving most of the protected areas as isolated ecological islands. Given the harsh situations (floods, droughts, wildfires, etc) organisms are restricted to escape to various refuge areas. Therefore, more need to be done to inform the policy and possibly switch from passive to active management of biodiversity for sustainable development; biodiversity conservation and sustained ecosystem goods and services.

To what extent diverse biological systems’ adaptability and vulnerability to climate change can sustain their economic productivity and the global economic growth?

All economic systems are grounded on the productivity of biological diversities used as primary, secondary and tertiary raw materials. Yet, they are being threatened by environmental changes. also, some biological systems adapt to the change by threatening other species. Therefore, it becomes imperative to study mechanisms of adaptability and vulnerability to climate change of different systems, and try to find out the extent to which they are able to sustain the human society livelihood under extreme climatic events. Unless we answer that question, the world may face a very extreme economic crisis that will lead to an everlasting financial crisis.

A similar question to the one asking if its safe to store CO2 underground but taking into account how it might effect processes within the Earth: Is there a danger of CCS trapping heat within the Earth and changing the processes that occur within the Earth?

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are governed by the processes within the earth. I would not like to have these processes changed so there are more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes happening. It will probly be hard to moniter how much heat could be trapped within the Earth though. Are there any records that people can get a sence of whats normal for the mantle from?

Hazardous Extreme Events: How can we check and revise “old good” paradigms to ensure better decision-making aimed at reduction of natural disasters? (climate phenomena, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc.)

“It is frightening that in our technocratic times baseline principles are not subjected to questioning, so that when they built the basis of trivial or, conversely, delicately-designed model, it is considered as a full replacement of natural phenomena.” (I.M.Gelfand 1989).

By definition, an extreme event is a rare one in a series of kindred phenomena. Even nowadays, usually, it implies investigating a small sample of case-histories with a help of delicate statistical methods and data of different quality, collected in various conditions. Many extreme events follow “strange” statistics far from usually accepted by contemporary theories.

Losses from natural disasters continue to increase mainly due to the lack of knowledge and poor understanding by the majority of scientific community, as well as by decision makers and people, the three components of Risk, i.e., Hazard, Exposure, and Vulnerability. Contemporary Science is responsible for not coping with the challenging changes of Exposures and their Vulnerability inflicted by growing population, its concentration, etc., which result in the observed steady increase of social Losses due to Natural Hazards. Scientists owe to the Society for lack of knowledge, education, and communication. Many recent disasters appear to be on the limit of a bloody fault committed by technocratic authorities and their advisers.

Based on the recent, enormous progress in real-time data retrieval and monitoring of distributed multiple geophysical characteristics world-wide, Contemporary Science can do a better job in disclosing natural hazards, assessing risks, and delivering such info in advance catastrophic events. Geoscientists must initiate shifting the minds of community from old-good paradigms of pessimistic disbelieve to optimistic challenging issues of predictability of extreme events.

Is it possible to work out the periodicity of global earthquakes fairly close to their ‘dates’ based on the available data?

Thousands of people are killed almost every year due to earthqaukes which strike in one or the other part of the globe. Most of the deadly ones are linked to earth tectonics like subduction, collision, transform faults etc. These processes have been operating in response to the stress/strain concentration in different global locales at different depths. The earthquake recording centres around the globe have gathered enormous data for earthquakes of different magnitudes at least for over a half century. Enormous new geophysical data is also being generated in recent years. Plus, abundant remote sensing data through satellites is aiding the interpretation of earth dynamics in a big way. In the backdrop of all these things, can earth scientists, geophysicists and concerned agencies work together to create a broad picture of the periodicity of earthqaukes in different parts of the globe, so that precautions and preparedness of the community, government and all the concerned agencies could handle the eventuality in a better way to minimise the loss of life and property.