Author Archive for kathryn

Dr Pandey’s paper  Inter-disciplinarity of Issues Connected with Climate Change, Food Security and Energy Alternatives has been published as part of The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses.

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.