CANBERRA, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Australia's peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), is severely lacking in climate scientists, according to a report released by the Australian Academy of Science on Thursday.
The Australian government began reducing its investment in climate science in 2014 under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, but Trevor McDougall, the former CSIRO oceanographer who led the academy's review, said the government needed to overhaul the current system to avoid costly mistakes and progress vital research.
He said the review asks for 77 additional positions to be created - 27 of which are needed immediately - in the fields of climate observation and modeling.
"We've come to the conclusion that about 80 new positions are needed in order to provide the sort of climate information that the community, companies need in terms of understanding how their particular industry is being and is going to be affected by the changes that are happening," McDougall told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Thursday.
"The changes that are happening, the uncertainty around those changes means we have to work harder, do more research, particularly in the climate modelling area, to be able to say with any confidence, for example how the rainfall and evaporation, the growing conditions in the Murray-Darling Basin will change over time, because currently we just don't know that."
Former CSIRO researcher John Church, who was at the organization for four decades and is one of the world's premier sea-level experts, said that while the redundancies were tough on researchers who were first fired under cuts announced by the government back in 2014, they did reveal that their research was vital and now lacking.
"I guess it was tough on me, but more importantly it did a lot of damage to climate science in Australia and Australia's relationships with international partners," Church told ABC radio.
"There have been various plans developed previously about what climate scientists needed but these have never moved to implementation."
The federal opposition has since come out in support of the report. A statement said the CSIRO "remains in crisis, reduced and under resourced, making climate change mitigation and adaptation harder and more expensive for all Australians, especially future generations."
