Wednesday, 01 June 2011

• Back in Beijing

  From 22 May to 2 June I was once again back in Beijing on my Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Professorship with the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, working Prof, Yao Tandong on the Science Plan for the Third Pole Environment project. For those who don't immediately recall TPE, it is in many ways, "MRI for the highlands of Asia" in that it seeks to promote and coordinate research on global environmental change on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau and all the mountain ranges that surround it in adjacent countries. MRI takes no credit for the emergence of TPE. It is entirely Prof. Yao's creation but the alignment of goals between TPE and MRI is so great, that it is natural for me to work with Prof. Yao on this project.

  TPE has been developing since its launching workshop in 2009, when I gave a keynote on Integrated Environmental Research in Beijing (replete with photos from the trip that Dan Fagre and I made in 2008 to Everest Base Camp on the Nepal side). At a meeting at ICIMOD in Kathmandu in 2010 participants sketched out variety of research activities, desired infrastructure and key products, all of which now need to find their natural place in a Science Plan. The TPE staff, Prof. Yao, myself and others discussed an outline for the Science Plan when I spent my epic two months in China last fall, and since then the TPE staff has been assembling text within that outline.During this trip I reviewed the results, made detailed suggestions for improvement and agreed to help with some abstracts of key sections of the report. The next version of the Science Plan will likely be the basis for more extended discussion prior to and during the third TPE workshop, scheduled for Iceland in August 2011.

  Beyond this most essential work on a strategic research plan for the largest and highest mountain region on Earth, I managed to make progress of a variety on other MRI business will in town. First, I ate many dinners with Chinese colleagues interested in coupled human-earth system modeling, including Zhang Yili, an ecologist who has worked on land use change on many parts of the Tibetan Plateau, Liu Linshan, a post-doc with Zhang, Huang Heqing, the GLP Beijing Node manager, and Yao Zhijun, an ecologist at the Institute of Geography, Dong Shikui, a professor at Beijing Normal University, Liu Hongyan, Dean of the School of Environment at Peking University and his wife, Yu Pengtao of the Chinese Academy of Forestry, and Du Fachun of the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Chinese Academy of Social Science. These dinner meetings clarified my thinking about Chinese participation in MRI's coupled human-natural system synthesis workshop. I also met Zhang Baiping, who wrote a paper about urbanization in Chinese mountains back in 2004, as I thought he might be interested in MRI's urbanization workshop. In fact, he has moved on to other topics (mass elevation effect, something that I had never heard of before, but which Christian Körner tells me is a well-known phenomenon) but recommended some other researchers, whom I subsequently notified about the workshop.

  Just by chance I heard that the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS) Mountain Group was holding a meeting while I was in Beijing. I immediately asked Ailikun, the manager of MAIRS, if I could attend. I participated in the launching meeting of MAIRS back in 2006, as it seemed like a major project vehicle by which we could pursue the global change in mountain region agenda within Asia. I have tried to stay in touch with MAIRS, even as I have been working with TPE, but was not able to participate in its last meeting in Kathmandu. Aili was happy to include me in the meeting, and it was very useful to see how the Mountain Group has evolved since 2006. The group has started to focus more on the human dimensions of global change in mountains, which in my mind, forms a nice complement to the more biophysical focus on TPE, though I have insisted, and Prof. Yao continues to humor me on this, that TPE itself needs to include humans in its analysis. It will be interesting to see how this potential complementarity - TPE creates projections of environmental change, used potentially by MAIRS to translate into vulnerability - works out.

  In the middle of all this, I went to Suzhou, outside of Shanghai, for two days last week to give two lectures on Climate Change in Mountains: What it Means and Why You Should Care at the request of the Swiss Embassy in China. I was pleased to do something for the Croix Blanche. I was even able to shake hands with the Swiss ambassador, Blaise Godet, and use a national language, if only for a few minutes!

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