Overview

Natural source inventories

Volcanic sulfur emissions

Volcanic organic
carbon emissions

Downloadable PDF version of IGACtivities, Issue No. 22.

IGACtivities homepage

IGAC homepage

of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project G

A Note from the IGAC Chair: Guy Brasseur IGAC and Education Much of the research in atmospheric chemistry conducted in universities and research centers has involved a large number of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. With the growing attention given to global change issues over the last two decades, educational programs focusing on atmospheric chemistry and biogeochemistry have attracted a large number of outstanding students interested in highly visible "global change" issues and the importance to society of environmental problems such as ozone loss and climate change. In recent years, however, the transformation of our economies and the importance of information technologies have created new challenges and new opportunities. Because many students have decided to invest their skills in these areas, university departments dealing with environmental issues have had increasing difficulties recruiting highly skilled students. This is apparently true in many countries around the world. Time has perhaps come for our scientific communities to rethink their priorities, and for the governments and funding agencies to reassess their support of the sciences. An important goal in a highly competitive world will be to maintain a pool of highly qualified scientists and engineers in the research/academic environment. The atmospheric chemistry community needs to participate in this discussion, and to recognize that environmental issues and the methods to address them are evolving. Environmental problems will remain important, precisely because the globalization of the economy will lead to new global environmental problems. But new concerns will require more integrated and more trans-disciplinary approaches. Key issues for atmospheric chemists lie at the borders between atmospheric chemistry and hydrology, meteorology, biology, oceanography, and socio-economics. Having scrutinized the world primarily from a disciplinary perspective, using global observing systems or global models, scientists in the next decades will probably attempt to apply fully integrated approaches to understand the evolution and the vulnerability of coherent regional areas. Education must adapt to this evolution and develop the appropriate methodologies. Student training must evolve towards integrative thinking in which the complexity of the Earth system is recognized.