TEA-START Regional Center

The Temperate East Asia Regional Centre for START (TEA-START) is located in Beijing, China and supported as a key laboratory in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its Director, Dr. Gensuo Jia, was one of START’s original Visiting Scientist Fellows and now oversees a staff of about 50 climate change researchers. TEA-START frequently collaborates with the START Secretariat on capacity building efforts in Asia.

In the past two years, TEA-START has conducted research, offered training workshops, and contributed to global climate change initiatives, highlighted below:

• Received a grant from the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) to conduct an International Training on Ecosystem-Climate Interactions at TEA-START in September 2014. This training provided 16 young researchers and practitioners from Asian countries with advanced knowledge and skills in this fast-moving field. Experts from China, Australia, and USA gave state-of-art lectures.
• Expanded by adding six new staff members, including: 1 senior professor, 2 visiting professors, and 3 assistant professors.
• Hosted a START Regional Fellow.
• Received accolades from the Chinese government. In 2014, a high level panel from the Chinese Academy of Sciences recognized TEA-START as "an excellent example of an important international achievement that has received worldwide attention."
• Sponsored an April 2015 special issue on regional climate modeling in the Journal of Climatic Change.
• Organized a joint workshop in January 2015 with NASA on earth observation of South Asia climate change to promote the use of earth observation technology in the region. The session on downstream effects was especially relevant to science-policy interface in the region.
• Was invited to contribute to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) flagship Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) assessment, due out in May 2016. Prof. Gensuo Jia, has been appointed as coordinating lead author of GEO-6 for the Asia-Pacific outlook.