Polar Expertise - Supporting Development

在极地地区工作，BAS开发了具有更广泛适用性的专业知识、仪器和建模技术，例如，在研究可以促进发展目标的地方。我们建议在官方发展援助国家开展两方面的研究，以BAS作为一个跨学科调查和研究机构的优势为基础，并继续近年来在赠款资助下开始的研究：一是关注印度河流域印度部分的水资源，另一个是关注南大西洋岛屿生态系统服务的长期安全。在印度，随着人口增长、经济快速增长和大型农业部门争夺日益稀缺或多变的水资源，获取水资源是一项关键的发展挑战（联合国可持续发展目标6），而预计的气候变化可能会加剧这一挑战。目前，印度河流量的近95%被用来灌溉世界上最大的灌溉农业系统，特别是在印度和巴基斯坦的旁遮普，该系统养活了2.37亿人口，而且还在不断增长。印度河系统起源于西喜马拉雅山脉，由雪和冰川融化和降水提供。近年来，该地区的积雪和冰川急剧萎缩，对供水构成严重威胁，但数千座冰川中几乎没有任何冰厚测量，因此该地区冰储量的大小是未知的。此外，该流域的基本降水输入很少被测量和了解。该提案将通过采用现有的BAS极地雷达技术从空气中调查冰川体积，以及开发一个高分辨率大气模型来表征当地气候变化（特别是通过改进其云微物理的表示以及它如何影响模拟降水）来解决这些缺陷。当与更广泛的冰川水文模型研究（例如由印度的合作伙伴进行的研究）联系起来时，这将使人们更好地了解当前和未来的可用水资源，从而在印度河用水方面做出更明智的政策决定。南大西洋孤立岛屿社区的粮食安全和经济，特别是特里斯坦-达库尼亚和圣赫勒拿岛，严重依赖海洋资源的捕捞，并在较小程度上依赖旅游业。这些资源大多来自被隔离在广阔的深海中的小型海岸陆架区和海山。了解这些资源对当前和未来的采伐、气候变化和物种入侵的脆弱性，将是维护这些社区未来经济和文化安全的关键。我们建议部署一个多学科的团队，为被剥削的海洋种群构建一个食物网，这将使我们能够确定食物链中的关键环节，并评估它们的脆弱性。科学巡航和陆地实地考察，辅以海洋模式模拟，将使我们了解变化，并最终确定任何长期趋势，包括气候变化信号。这个项目的关键在于，它将整合所有以前的研究，以开发一种长期的研究方法，这将提高我们对环境变化对沿海大陆架生态系统的原因和后果的理解。它将留下强大的海洋学和食物网模型，为制定管理海洋生态系统资源的政策，特别是与粮食安全和生态旅游有关的政策提供必要的科学信息。此外，在直接提供给岛屿政府规划的同时，这项研究的成果也将提供给一些积极参与海洋生物多样性保护的国际组织。

Working in the Polar Regions, BAS has developed expertise, instrumentation and modelling techniques that have wider applicability, e.g. where research can contribute to development goals. We propose two strands of research in ODA countries that build upon the strengths of BAS as an interdisciplinary survey and research institute, and which continue strands of research begun in recent years under grant funding: one focused on water resources in the Indian section of the Indus river basin, and the other on the long term security of ecosystem services on South Atlantic Islands. Access to water in India is a key development challenge (UN SDG 6) as population growth, a rapidly expanding economy and a large agricultural sector compete for increasingly scarce or variable supplies, and this is likely to be exacerbated by predicted climate change. Already, almost 95% of Indus river flow is extracted to feed the world's largest system of irrigated agriculture, particularly in Indian and Pakistani Punjab, which supports 237 million people and growing. The Indus river system originates in the western Himalayas, fed by snow and glacier melt and precipitation. Snow cover and glaciers in this region have shrunk dramatically in recent years, posing a serious threat to this water supply, but almost none of its thousands of glaciers have any ice thickness measurements and so the size of the region's ice reserves is unknown. Furthermore, the fundamental precipitation inputs to this river basin are sparsely measured and poorly understood. This proposal will address these deficiencies by adapting existing BAS polar radar techniques to survey glacier volumes from the air, and developing a high resolution atmospheric model to characterise local climate variability (particularly by improving its representation of cloud microphysics and how this affects simulated precipitation). When linked to wider glacio-hydrological modelling studies (e.g. those to be undertaken by partners in India) this will lead to better understanding of present-day and future water availability, resulting in better informed policy decisions on Indus river water use.The food security and economies of isolated island communities in the South Atlantic, in particular Tristan da Cunha and St Helena, are heavily reliant on harvesting marine resources and, to a lesser degree, tourism. Most of these resources are taken from the small coastal shelf areas and seamounts that are isolated in vast areas of deep ocean. Understanding how vulnerable these resources are to current and future harvesting, climate change and species invasion will be key to maintaining the future economic and cultural security of these communities. We propose to deploy a multi-disciplinary team to construct a food-web for the exploited marine populations that will allow us to identify critical links in the food chain and to assess their vulnerability. Scientific cruises and land-based fieldwork, complemented by ocean model simulations, will allow us to understand the variability and eventually to identify any longer term trends, including climate change signals.The key to this project is that it will integrate all previous studies to develop a long term study methodology that will improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of environmental change to the coastal shelf ecosystem. It would leave a legacy of robust oceanographic and food web modelling that will provide the scientific information necessary to develop policies to manage marine ecosystem resources, especially those relating to food security and eco-tourism. Moreover, whilst feeding directly into Island governmental planning, the outputs from this research will also feed into a number of International organisations that are actively involved in conservation of marine biodiversity.