With this focus issue, Mountain Research and Development (MRD) aims to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of drought in mountains and its impacts on communities and ecosystems in highlands and lowlands. MRD seeks contributions that offer insights into the complex and cascading effects of drought, bridge disciplinary boundaries, and provide actionable knowledge for coping with drought and water scarcity in mountain regions worldwide.
About 2 billion people rely directly on water from mountain regions for their livelihoods, including drinking, sanitation, energy production, and food security. Yet mountains, once widely considered water secure, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to drought. These ‘drier than normal’ conditions are primarily driven by climate change, through shifting precipitation patterns and increased evaporative demand, and can be further intensified by human activities.
Globally, droughts are becoming more frequent, severe, and prolonged, with far-reaching consequences for mountain communities and ecosystems. Unlike sudden hazards, droughts develop gradually and often remain undetected until their impacts are already occurring. Drought has wide-ranging and interconnected ecological, social, and economic impacts. Ecologically, drought induces plant water stress, reducing growth and causing vegetation dieback. It also shifts species composition and disrupts soil moisture processes, slowing decomposition and nutrient cycling and altering microbial communities. In mountain regions, drought is closely linked to a shrinking cryosphere and reduced underground water storage, as diminished snowpack and glacier melt reduce the seasonal water supply and intensify water stress downstream. Reduced streamflow and the drying up of wetlands degrade alpine habitats, while dry conditions increase the risk of wildfires and pest outbreaks. Over time, these changes can reduce biodiversity, weaken ecosystem functions such as carbon storage and water regulation, and diminish overall ecosystem resilience.
Prolonged dry periods and reduced water availability undermine agriculture and rural livelihoods, potentially leading to income loss, higher food prices, and food insecurity. They also affect domestic water supply, sanitation, and public health, often disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations. The drying of springs—the primary source of water for many mountain communities—increases the drudgery of women and girls who bear the greater burden of water provisioning. In many regions, the impacts of drought can lead to migration, putting additional strain on urban systems and intensifying competition over scarce water resources. Therefore, recurrent droughts can exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities and weaken community resilience and adaptive capacity. Drought also disrupts hydropower generation and tourism, affecting key economic activities in mountain regions. Additional costs arise from emergency water provision or disaster response. Repeated droughts can increase financial vulnerability and place sustained pressure on livelihoods, public budgets, and insurance systems alike. In extreme cases, droughts can trigger complex and compounding hazards, including infrastructure failures caused by flooding due to reduced soil infiltration capacity or famines resulting from crop failure.
Despite significant advances in understanding the mechanisms and impacts of drought in mountain regions, spanning diverse continents, elevation gradients, and socioeconomic sectors, important knowledge gaps persist. The increasing use of remote sensing, machine learning, and large-scale inventory databases has substantially improved the detection and characterization of drought processes. Yet, mountain regions remain underrepresented in observational records, limiting our ability to fully capture the spatial complexity of drought dynamics in mountains and their effects downstream. There is growing evidence that the costs of dealing with environmental and water crises often far exceed the costs of preventing these crises, particularly when nature-based solutions are employed. It is important to critically assess how preventive approaches, such as investing in watershed restoration, aquifer recharge, or riparian protection, can provide affordable and sustainable solutions, as opposed to crisis responses that consume resources without addressing the root causes.
In addition, the long-term ecological legacy effects of repeated or prolonged drought events are still insufficiently understood, particularly regarding ecosystem recovery and societal resilience. Similarly, evidence on the effectiveness of governance structures and processes related to drought remains fragmented, with limited cross-sectoral and regional evaluation of what works, where, and under which conditions. Crucially, studies should consider highlands and lowlands as a continuum and systematically link hazard, exposure, and vulnerability across sectors and timescales.
For this focus issue, MRD seeks papers that advance understanding of drought processes and human contributions leading to societal, ecological, and economic risks and impacts, or present innovative responses to drought, from local adaptation practices to policy and governance approaches. Contributions focusing on moving from reactive responses to resilience are particularly welcome. More specifically, we invite scholars and development practitioners to contribute to MRD’s 3 peer-reviewed sections in the following ways:
MountainDevelopment (transformation knowledge): Papers should present lessons learned from the systematic evaluation of development interventions, local practices, and policy efforts, or insights from transdisciplinary and practice-oriented research related to drought. They should focus on how initiatives have helped to mitigate and adapt to drought. For example, papers may assess the positive and negative impacts of community-based water management practices, such as traditional collection, or innovations for water storage in mountain regions, such as artificial ice bodies.
MountainResearch (systems knowledge): Papers should present empirical research or meta-analyses focusing on social and/or environmental change dynamics of drought and their impacts on mountain societies and ecosystems. We particularly encourage comparative studies across regions, as well as syntheses that bridge science and practice. For example, papers may examine the effectiveness of nature-based preventive approaches, such as watershed protection and aquifer recharge, the impacts of drought on human and livestock health, or the release of organic and inorganic pollutants from thawing permafrost, as well as increased sediment loads following heavy rainfall after drought periods. In addition, given that mountain regions often lack reliable hydrological and climate records, contributions are encouraged that explore accessible and scalable solutions for strengthening regional data networks, community-based monitoring, capacity building, and standardized protocols to improve the effectiveness and equity of adaptation efforts.
MountainAgenda (target knowledge): Papers should propose agendas and priorities for future policies, interventions, or research, with a focus on promoting sustainable mountain futures. The agendas must be based on a sound analysis of current thinking that results either from a rigorous and in-depth literature review or from a systematic stakeholder process in the respective field. Reviews of work on the integration of transformational resilience-building in mountains into national or regional policies and strategies are also highly welcome.
Denis Samyn (Topic Editor, MRD), João Carlos Azevedo, Astrid Björnsen, Davide Cotti, Stefano Terzi, Adriaan van der Walt (Guest Editors), Brigitte Portner (Associate Editor, MRD).
Submission Details
- Email a short notice of intent (including a working title, 2–3 sentences on the content, and the journal section to which you intend to submit the paper) to mrd-journal.cde@unibe.ch by 15 June 2026.
- Submit your full paper by 15 September 2026 using MRD’s online submission platform.
- The issue is scheduled for completion in August 2027; articles will be published on a rolling basis, as soon as they are ready.
- Before submitting, please read our guidelines for authors.
- For more information on the journal, explore this website.
- As a not-for-profit open access journal, MRD charges authors a publication fee to offset part of its production costs. Authors who have insufficient funding to cover the fee may apply for a partial or full waiver.