Belmont Forum Scoping Workshop at Goa

The world’s main funders of environmental change research formed a new, high-level group called the Belmont Forum with the aim to mobilize international resources at a scale that matches the challenges from global environmental change, in order to catalyse delivery of the environmental science-derived solutions that society needs. The Belmont Forum has developed collaborative research actions (CRAs) to address societally relevant global environmental change challenges; lever member’s existing investments through international added value; and bring together new partnerships of natural scientists, social scientists, and users with the following features.

The Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India and the French National Research Agency together with the Belmont Forum organised an International Call Scoping Workshop entitled “Seasonal to decadal predictability of regional climate for decision making: bridging the gap between users’ needs and the state of climate knowledge”, which was  hosted by the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research in Goa during 23 to 25th October 2013. This meeting was following the propositions and decisions adopted at the February meeting of the Belmont Forum in Delhi and the subsequent pre-scoping meeting in Paris.

The objective of the workshop was to co-define research priorities on societal issues related to seasonal to decadal variability of regional climate, emphasizing on monsoon and its teleconnections with extra tropical and Polar Regions. The scoping exercise was involved by about 50 invited scientists, experts and program officers from many countries. The CRA will be presented to Belmont Forum in its meeting at Cape Town, in South Africa on December 4th, 2013 and also to JPI Climate General Body at Copenhagen, on December 13th, 2013 to introduce a draft announcement  for this international research opportunity.