How does Climate Change affect the Asian Summer Monsoon?

Country like India very much depend on its economy in agriculture. So the rainfall amount determine the agriculture sector growth etc.

Climate change is expected to involve increasing climate variability. Can we manage our water resources while floods and droughts increase in frequency and severity without adding more storage space through building dams and other storage facilities?

Dams, surface, but also underground storage reservoirs are conventional means to reduce the dependability on the natural occurrence and availability of water. While these technical solutions are not without controversy storage facilities equipped with hydropower stations could even account for some GHG reduction. There is a need for an ideology free global assessment and recommendations for those regions where climate change is expected to manifest itself most viciously.

what is the linkage between agricultural activities, biodiversity loss and sediment and nutrient fluxes into water systems and the overall impact of environmental degradation on the survival of humankind?

Agricultural production is a predominant activity of the majority of the rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, due to land degradation as a result of inappropriate farming techniques, there is continued loss of Biodiversity and soil fertility through soil and water erosion and these eroded materials (sediments and nutrient fluxes) end up choking water systems, this is evident in the network of rivers that feed into lake Victoria in East Africa.

Current trajectory of human action is not sustainable at a global scale: how can scientific understanding of complex systems and human perturbations devise sustainable development pathways across the scientific, policy and resource management divide, particularly at the regional level where most decisions are taken?

During the last 50 years the human population has risen from to 2,5 to over 6 billion. The use of land, water, minerals and other natural resources has increased almost ten-fold over the last two hundred years and approximately 50% of the ice-free land surface has now been significantly modified by humans and most of the rest is managed for human purposes. This phenomenon, which has obvious implications, creates the need to study the interactions, which occur on different temporal and spatial scales, affecting the biosphere and which are particularly susceptible to human actions, especially the efforts to provide a growing human population with food, energy, shelter and employment.

A global change research perspective which places primary emphasis on the global scale often misses a vast amount of work, frequently done under other guises, which is directly relevant to the study of global change phenomena. Such work is crucial for understanding the underlying processes which when aggregated constitute global change. Ultimately global change research will provide much of the underlying scientific understanding of complex systems and human perturbations that is required to devise sustainable development pathways at regional level. The drive for sustainability – the desire to make the development of the growing ‘human enterprise’ more compatible with the natural evolution of the Earth system – gives global change research its most fundamental rationale and connection to applications in policy and resource management. Where global change research is weak – application of the work through interaction with the policy and resource management sectors, sustainable development science is strong; and where sustainable development work is often weak – understanding the fundamental dynamics of complex environmental systems, global change research is strong. Clearly, the two fields of enquiry should work in much closer harmony in the future.

How can semi-arid agrosystems adapt to expected changes in climate and anthropogenic forcing?

Due to growths in water scarcities and population needs, agrosystems in semi-arid region have to increase their agronomic performances in terms of water use efficiencies and yields, where both can be regarded at the scale of regional watersheds that include several compartments (shallow and deep aquifers, crop mosaics, hydro-agricultural constructions) in relation with distribution of blue and green water. Decision support systems for the benefit of stakeholders have to be strengthened by relying on biophysically based modeling platform that encompass the aforementioned compartments and the related water flows. This requires first parameterizing and calibrating the modeling platform components, where the use of remote sensing if of prime interest for constraining models in a spatially distributed manner, and then setting up realistic scenarios from the calibrated modeling platforms. In this context, special efforts have to be made over relief areas, where hilly structures allow water harvesting for irrigation purposes, and therefore the maintaining of agricultural populations along with their economical activities.

Where and how will population pressure and climate change affect the availability of freshwater for human needs and diverse ecological communities?

Regional patterns of population pressure and human demands for freshwater will likely interact with the effects of climate change to alter the distribution and availability of freswater across the face of the globe. Humans and freshwater/estuarine ecosystems will both suffer. We need to be able to predict the effects of climate change on freshwater resources in order to understand how humans and ecosystems will be threatened by lack of adequate freshwater, and by loss of the ecological goods and sevices provided by rivers and estuaries (e.g,. fish, fibres, flood mitigation).

Does global warming bring more rain or less rain, and how the rainfall pattern is changed around the globe?

water is one of the most important resources affecting people’s lives. We need to know how global warming changes the pattern of the rainfall, so the policy makers and governments can plan and implement policies that can mitigate severe problems such as drought or flooding, and infrastructure to distribute water effectively.

Given current rates of global change, what “management” tools and at what scale will ensure sufficient clean water to support the ecosystem services people depend on including biodiversity?

People can not live without water not only because they need it for drinking but because the food they grow and the fisheries they depend are intricately tied to a the availability of adequate clean water. As populations grow, extractions increase, pollution increases, water resources change in response to climate change….if we do not manage this biophysical resource (clean water), more people will die through starvation or other forms, wars will increase, etc

What is the relative importance of climate change compared to other human induced influences (hydrological, physical) on the water system (at river basin level)

It is important not to over- or underestimate the impacts of climate change in order to have the proper position in negotiations about climate change and in discussions about funding of adaptation. Obstacles are: high uncertainty levels; lack of basic data series of sufficient length (rainfall, hydrology of surface and groundwater, land use changes); downscaling of climate change scenarios to river basin level

How and why is the cryosphere changing? How are these changes impacting people and eco-systems around the planet? What can be done to ameriolate these changes?

The cryosphere is one of the most dynamic, least sampled and least understood components of the Earth system. Changes in the cryosphere impact the water supply for millions, if not billions of people on the planet and seriously alter the availability of water for industry, irrigation, consumption and sanitation. Changing sea level *will* impact those on the coast, changes in seasonal snow cover will impact regional climate and the Earths albedo. Changes in the Earths polar ice sheets are alarming, but not yet fully understood. Changing ice and snow affects all other aspects of the Earth system – ecology, geology, hydrology, atmospheric science, marine systems, social systems, economic systems and human health. We cannot ignore the cryosphere. Obstacles – perceived relevance to the science funding agencies of tropical countries, politics of high latitudes, resource management challenges. In my opinion decreasing water supplies will be the cause of future international tensions.