Mountain futures

The future is increasingly shaped by uncertainty as climate change drives unprecedented and irreversible ecosystem changes. These impacts are felt most acutely by those living at high elevations. Imagination and creativity are crucial to foster new ways to adapt to these challenges. How science is used to envision possible and desirable futures will help set the ambition that shapes who stands to benefit and the trade-offs associated with these processes of rapid transformation. For example, current narratives highlight the loss of glacier mass. However, emerging post-glacial ecosystems are also generating new ecosystems. Subsequent claims for the newly available land resources are often unclear and contested, urgently calling for management strategies to secure future ecosystem services. While many actors recognize the importance of new ecosystems and new challenges in mountains, new knowledge is needed to steer the development of these new futures towards sustainability and to envision possible transformation pathways. In particular, the potential for nature-based transformation is recognised as essential to change not only relations between people and nature but also relations among people in order to harness the potential of ecosystems for adaptation. Yet, beyond generic principles and a rapidly increasing number of place-based case studies, we don’t have a structured, evidence-based understanding of social-ecological adaptation in mountains. Developing and sharing new narratives and models with diverse stakeholders in mountain-social-ecological systems will be essential to set ambition that shapes equitable transformation. This focus session will collect new narratives and models that can shape responses to the on-going unprecedented climate-driven social-ecological changes in mountain areas around the world. We will discuss options for scaling transformation cases across locations (scaling out), into institutions and policy (scaling up) and into social values (scaling deep). We will interrogate regionally-relevant processes of networking for collective knowledge generation, implementation and effective governance in mountain regions. The inputs will be used to draft a global research agenda calling for forward-looking, just, collaborative, long-term approaches to address future impacts and risks across the world’s mountains.