Is climate research being held back by local instrumentation?, Pg8

Key Highlights:

• The Mega Science Vision-2035 report on Climate Research highlights India's significant inability to indigenously manufacture quality scientific instruments.
• Prepared by the Indian climate research community with IISc, Bengaluru, the report was submitted to the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India.
• It warns that reliance on imported, often uncalibrated, instruments leads to incorrect data and questions the credibility of Indian science.
• India has pledged to achieve 500 GW of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030, having already crossed the halfway mark in 2025.
• The report proposes a pan-India Climate and Health Observatory and outlines eight mega projects for comprehensive climate research.

Detailed Insights:

• The Mega Science Vision exercise, traditionally focused on fields like nuclear and high-energy physics, has been expanded to include climate research, ecology, and astronomy.
• Despite successful development of prototypes such as automatic profiling floats and automatic weather stations, India struggles to translate these into industrial-scale products.
• A proposed solution to mandate "Made in India" instruments faces challenges, as evidenced by the rollback of the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal for scientific institutions due to issues with specialized equipment procurement.
• The report emphasizes the need for studies to assess the long-term environmental effects of uncontrolled tapping of renewable energy sources, even while prioritizing their continued development.
• It advocates for developing scientific methods to estimate the social cost of carbon and implementing a "polluter pays" mechanism to mitigate environmental degradation.
• The report identifies critical gaps in India's paleoclimate networks, warns about the risks of crossing climate tipping points, and highlights the shortage of trained manpower in areas like environmental epidemiology.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Mega Science Vision: A strategic planning exercise for large, long-term scientific projects, now extended to critical areas like climate research.
• Social Cost of Carbon: A monetary estimate of the economic damages associated with emitting one additional tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
• Polluter Pays Principle: An environmental policy principle where the party responsible for causing pollution bears the costs of preventing or remedying the damage.
• Climate Tipping Points: Critical thresholds in the Earth's climate system that, once crossed, lead to large, often irreversible changes.