welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public visit our website for our program of the center for energy supply unary studies of mountain and hill environment at the university of delhi in india this year he is a fellow at the radcliffe institute for advanced research at harvard university where he's writing a book on the somalia's or the himalayas as we say here amalia is called the roof of the world and as such has a critical role in climate change and environmental health of the planet in a single generation this icon of nature has been assaulted by the combined stresses of climate change and reckless development dr pundit's research is concerned with complex ecological systems of amalia and the impact of ecological stress his research combines multiple types of data and investigative approaches resulting in a much deeper understanding of the dynamic situation in the amalia today dr penned it received his ph d from the university of delhi and subsequently joined the faculty there in two thousand nine hundred the director of the school's environment studies and later the head of the department of environmental studies dr penned it was elected to the national academy of sciences in india in twenty four team tonight he explains the vulnerability and resilience of the him alia ecological systems and the work of his him alia lab we are very pleased and honor to welcome dr maharaj pand i want to be giving you a bit of background too to do this job and the subject of climate change the look there are a lot of confusion about climate change not for  temperatures which is also very well established and the kind of anomalous weather that we get which is indicative of global warming well it's not very well established but it is likely to very likely and we very likely understand what are the drivers of these global changes sadly that we are aware of the solutions to the problem these are well understood but the prospect of initial initiating solutions by particularly the developed nations they are nations which have a huge coastline is the sea level rise and the recent studies very clearly suggest that the sea level rise the causes  remember to that besides the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases there is an under the immediate threat which is the methane hydrates we're not currently focusing on methane hydrates geologists suggest that that this was perhaps the most important job physical change on earth because once the himalaya were formed they significantly impacted the global and regional climate live in these basins more you know more broad they're not tall there are so high and they are almost embedded in the local surroundings the material they used at that point of time was you know stone missi huge urban structures coming up which give rise to urban heat island effect then one of the one of the important things that has been happening in the  are coming down rapidly we expect that by two thousand but by the turn of the century you would have roughly about twenty five to forty percent of reasons but also there are some these regional reasons and then what we found was that that that there is the cause of these warming scenario in the amalia species are now moving more no important problem which is facing himalaya today is is almost unprecedented tourism so you have these huge roads vast number of causes as you can see that you know so now you have you know millions of people where earlier roughly about twenty thousand or thirty thousand people would go in a year to today in one season two hundred to three hundred thousand people with it those those areas therefore concentrated tourism in areas that do not have very high carrying capacity of of human you know human presents then you have the consequences of this  we know now through scientific studies that when there is this increased black carbon there is increased glacial recession so more number of roads more number of vehicles more amount of black consequences on production of pollution like black carbon and ultimately leading to less a recession so glaciers are being eroded are being lost because of these activities then interesting again we wanted to know in the himalaya where are more number of species at what elevations were number of species and this is how how we found whether these are higher plants or whether it is a birds or butterfly mammals fish directly or indirectly leading to species losses but because of this unfortunate overlap you have habitats which have these huge number of species also being big big being you know there are a huge number of and all these are undermining what is called the carrying capacity of the himalayan therefore about two years back i gave a call that he needs to be protected we need to look for a safe space for the him our findings you know lead us to conclude that the mean temperatures had increased not so much in the warmer months that means not is what is critical for them to understand is that the temperatures have changed in the colder months and biologists would know that it is these colder months it is  that minimum temperature which is extremely important for the process of lovely so in the spring in the spring when the when the plants fly it would depend on what kind of temperature profile or temperature you know temper warmer winter months are warmer but they're not as warm as the colder months so that is a critical that was one of the critical observations the second thing was that four hundred six hundred meters and the next one eleven percent is about six and so that means eleven percent showed eleven percent of the species had shown a shift of about six hundred to eight hundred meters so they had gone up by six hundred eight  you know hundred twenty four species that we examined you'll see a large majority of their lower margins and upper margins had significantly shifted from the historic ranges and then the second thing the large number or a maximum number of species even they are shifting they have shifted two things from this if you see this graph two things very clearly one is that the maxima or the peak of number of species have shifted up by about two hundred to three hundred meters or more but significantly more significantly in recent times the total number of species protected has gone down significantly so now that means you so these are some of the examples which rich rich we looked at and this is exactly what what they showed where the species had contracted there the you know the ranges are contracted by fifty percent for example ram noble a very very number of species in recent times have increased that means there is that there is no crowding effect happening at those species so a large number of species which are in alien they are now going up those those mountain tops and the indigenous species are are being eroded are being are going extinct and they are being invaded by extent by people can people go into these areas they harvest for example but it's not plants or mushrooms and spices condiments because him earlier this all toots is full of these species and people you temperatures and higher elevations you have profiteer you have you have the crops are failing so people have to keep all communities in the himalaya have to now advance their sowing season so they have in some areas they have advance sowing season by by a month and therefore the the whole season of crop has has has has significantly shrunk similarly for horticulture the crops like like for example  these climate changes happening in their model then also simultaneously what is happening is that there are also environmental refugees or a mantle of migrations happen happening one example which comes really to me to my mind is that in global changing that can occur one one thing which i mentioned the beginning is the sea level rise for example so sea level rise is a major major problem and we have we need to get concerned about it warming is happening and also what what you just want to pause here for a while and tell you that we not only found that the to malia the species were moving up or moving north but we found that warming the level of temperature change was significantly higher in the himalayas understandably so because the the the mountain range is very close to the tropics is tropics very very close to the equator rise which will impact everybody which is not necessarily the second thing of course is more warming but again going back to a bit a bit more here this picture that you see here is that of yu for the people's livelihoods and the regional water cycle crop growth timings as i said have changed and some communities have even migrated so what do we so do we do so what is suggested that we need to  currently happening is that there are more talkers there are more people who can speak good english possibly and maybe maybe have access to lovely language but but we need more informed inducements to to make informed we're not talking how to save this earth this is the only earth we have there's no other there's no other earth there's no place to go so if we destroyed it we destroy our own home there'll be no no place to go for us therefore these these these negotiations cannot be long protracted endless and ultimately futile they need to be focused for example one thing that comes to my mind immediately is happen then all of us can pack up and go home it's a bleak scenario i'm sorry to paint this blixen area but then somebody has to build a cat thank you and thank you for your time engage with public for more than one reason the absence of experts engaging with public there is a space for mumbo jumbo those who benefit from the confusion so we sadly have more negotiators at the international fora as you would have realized from the recent paris summit and not the real experts go there the end result of all this confusion is that these declarations at these international fora are nice sounding pros is a recent example of this achieved is one that meets all the requirements of what would be a meaningful foundation for long term action but it is only a foundation so whether the agreement itself is ultimately successful that is something that can be judged only ten twenty or even thirty years from now so one can one can see that the begin with the gentleman stocks about the success of the agreement but ends up saying that we would come to know about a success only thirty years from now