Catalyzing Transformations to Sustainability in the World's Mountains

Abstract

Mountain social‐ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES sites worldwide, we test a conceptual model of the types and scales of stressors and ecosystem services in MtSES and explore their distinct configurations according to their primary economic orientation and land use. We find that MtSES worldwide are experiencing both gradual and abrupt climatic, economic, and governance changes, with policies made by outsiders as the most ubiquitous challenge. Mountains that support primarily subsistence‐oriented livelihoods, especially agropastoral systems, deliver abundant services but are also most at risk. Moreover, transitions from subsistence‐ to market‐oriented economies are often accompanied by increased physical connectedness, reduced diversity of cross‐scale ecosystem services, lowered importance of local knowledge, and shifting vulnerabilities to threats. Addressing the complex challenges facing MtSES and catalyzing transformations to MtSES sustainability will require cross‐scale partnerships among researchers, stakeholders, and decision makers to jointly identify desired futures and adaptation pathways, assess trade‐offs in prioritizing ecosystem services, and share best practices for sustainability. These transdisciplinary approaches will allow local stakeholders, researchers, and practitioners to jointly address MtSES knowledge gaps while simultaneously focusing on critical issues of poverty and food security.

Design and implementation of a national ecosystem assessment – insights from the French mountain systems’ experience

“…Results from the French mountain NEA were synthetized as key messages for decision makers, a now well accepted, and even expected, format of the communication strategy (Allison and (Mathevet et al 2016). Among others, this holds true between sources of pressures and locations of their effects, for example, climate change, and between ES supply and demand, where mountains provide disproportionate amounts of ES to remote beneficiaries (Klein et al 2019). Our mountain committee experts insisted that locally this would imply considering and strengthening the spatial, environmental and economic complementarities among municipalities that ensure the diversity of e.g.…”

“…In France and other European countries, urban populations benefit from mountain ES like provision of quality food, clean water or recreation and tourism, creating a downward ES flow from mountains to valleys. At the same time, the policy mix and economic markets, which are mostly regulated out of mountain perimeters and exert a high influence on mountain landscapes and livelihoods, exert an upward influence from valleys to mountains (van der Sluis et al 2018), a feature common to many developed and developing mountain regions (Klein et al 2019). During the third mountain committee meeting, specifically focused on governance aspects, committee members shared their expertise on how the profuse and intricate set of existing land planning and regional development instruments can support socio-economic and environmental sustainability by implementing and regulating these dependencies.…”

“…Further, we emphasize the originality of the French mountain assessment, which is to our knowledge the only European country where high altitude systems were considered in a dedicated national assessment report. Given the sensitivity of mountains to global and local changes, it appears critical to pay special attention to these fragile ecosystems that deliver ecosystem benefits to people far beyond their borders (Grêt-Regamey et al 2012;Palomo 2017;Klein et al 2019;Schirpke et al 2019b).…”

The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes

“…This finding, confirming earlier reports of this kind of altitudinal concentration [30], suggests that diversity is potentially vulnerable with pests and diseases 'pushing' landraces upwards to limits where abiotic stress is highest (frost, hail) and land use for cropping competes with livestock. Sustained exposure to global presses (i.e., climate change) and local pulses (i.e., extreme weather events) has been shown to contribute to biodiversity loss and further drive land-use transformations across the world's complex and bioculturally rich mountain environments [90].…”

An adaptive regional vulnerability assessment model: Review and concepts for data-scarce regions

“…The need for further research to identify vulnerability indicators for hazard impact assessment has been emphasized by the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015(ISDR, 2005. More recently, several studies have re-emphasized the importance 65 of identifying and understanding vulnerability indicators as a fundamental step in disaster risk reduction (e.g., UN/ISDR, 2015;Zimmermann and Keiler, 2015;Klein et al, 2019). Vulnerability indicators allow the identification of parameters that influence how hazards impact the built environment.…”