There has been an unprecedented growth of many developing countries in the past decade and there are good reasons to believe that today's developing nations will be equal partners of the developed world in not too distant a future. But with development the environmental and ecosystem degradation are rising at an equally fast pace and at least one of the consequences of this degradation, the global warming, has the potential of making our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development be in vain. The ability of the human society to reason and link the causes and their effects should have led to appropriate remedial action but this is one instance where our feedback mechanism has not led to corrective actions at the desired scale. The increasing complexity of our environment requires an enhanced capacity for scientific assessment and monitoring. Comprehensive studies across the different geographical locations and human societies would generate an appropriate informational base for policy formulation and decision making process and help allocate scare resources among rationally among the many mitigation and adaptation options for taking global warming.

The Institute of Global Warming and Ecological Studies (IGWES) aims at enhancing the understanding of global warming, its causes, possible mitigation options and the technical and social adaptation that would be required to deal with the consequences of warming that is unavoidable. Later branches in a few strategically important developing countries across the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia would also be set up with the objective of not only research in the field of global warming but also enabling societies to incorporate the environmental externalities not directly captured by the markets and existing accounting systems in the formulation of their developmental and economic policies across the world. The main objectives and mission of the proposed include:

•  Set up an academic center of excellence that provides highest quality education, training and research facilities in the field of global warming, its mitigation and adaptation to it, and the evaluation of its ecological and environmental consequences.

•  Provide consultancy, valuation and arbitration services in issues related to global warming and other important ecological and environmental issues across the world.

Activities:

This institute has been specifically set up to contribute towards the fulfillment of the target 9 of the UN Millennium Development Goal 7 (MDG7) of ensuring environmental sustainability that calls for integration of the principles of sustainable development into country's policy and programs and reversal of the loss of environmental resources, and shall also be in pursuance of the aims of the Bali Strategic Plan for Technology Support and Capacity Building for International Environmental Governance of the UNEP that seeks to strengthen the capacities of the developing nations to develop data collection, monitoring, analysis and assessment capacities of environmental trends and in establishing infrastructure for scientific development and environmental management. The Institute seeks to make its contributions to the achievement of these goals through research, teaching, training and consultancies in the following thrust areas

(1) Climate change negotiations beyond the Kyoto Protocol – enhancing equity in favour of the developing nations

(2) Effect on biodiversity and wetlands of the entire Himalayan and sub-Himalayan ranges in India , China , Nepal , Bhutan , Bangladesh , Pakistan , Afghanistan and Myanmar due to climate change

(3) Effect on coastal zone and mangroves of South and South-east Asia due to global warming

(4) Biofuels as partial replacement for fossil fuels in South, South-east and East Asia

(5) Socio-economic aspects, including migration studies, of global warming in south, South-east and East Asia

(6) Vulnerability of food crops in major food growing areas to increased pest, diseases and nematods in tropics