Across the MRI’s contributions, a shared theme emerged: biodiversity futures in mountains are inseparable from the social and institutional systems that shape land use, livelihoods, and collective decision-making.
The Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) contributed to the World Biodiversity Forum 2026 in Davos from the 15-18 June through two dedicated sessions and the wider participation of members of its Scientific Leadership Council. Across the week, the MRI-supported contributions highlighted a central message: mountain biodiversity cannot be understood through ecological change alone. It is shaped by livelihoods, land tenure, governance, social innovation, cultural landscapes and the institutions that enable communities to respond to global change.
Mountains occupy a crucial place in global biodiversity debates. They cover around one quarter of the Earth’s land surface, are home to approximately 1.2 billion people, and include 25 of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots. They are also centres of cultural diversity, traditional knowledge and complex social-ecological systems. At WBF 2026, MRI’s contributions helped bring these mountain dimensions into conversations on biodiversity recovery, restoration, conservation science and transformative change.
Tenure for Nature: Why Land Rights Matter in Biodiversity Governance
The MRI supported the workshop Tenure for Nature – Why Land Rights Matter in Biodiversity Governance, organised with the MRI Mountain Governance Working Group. The session brought together case studies from Myanmar, India and Nepal, Madagascar, and the Sinai Peninsula to explore how land tenure shapes biodiversity outcomes in mountain and upland regions.
The workshop began from a simple but often overlooked proposition: biodiversity governance is also land governance. Rights determine who can steward, restore, exclude, access and benefit from land. For many mountain communities, land is not only an ecological space, but a system of social relations, authority, memory, livelihood security and cultural identity.
The presentations showed striking connections across very different regions. In the Naga hills of northwest Myanmar, customary tenure systems sustain complex landscape mosaics of shifting cultivation, fallows, old-growth forests, watershed forests, sacred sites, gardens and terraces. These landscapes are often misread by formal policy systems as degraded, empty or underutilised. Yet evidence from participatory mapping and community research shows that they are highly multifunctional, supporting food security, biodiversity, cultural practices and ecological resilience.
A presentation from the Himalayan uplands developed this argument through the concept of community stewardship. It showed how tenure security can activate local care, knowledge and agency, allowing communities to maintain biodiversity-rich landscapes through their own institutions and rules. Rather than treating communities as passive beneficiaries of conservation projects, this approach makes stewardship visible, measurable and fundable without stripping it of its local meaning.
The Madagascar case added a restoration perspective. It showed that land tenure insecurity can undermine restoration outcomes, particularly where communities fear that planting native trees or allowing forest regeneration may lead to the state claiming their land. In such situations, communities may choose fast-growing exotic species or other visible land uses not because these are better for biodiversity, but because they help mark and defend de facto land rights.
Taken together, the session raised a difficult but important question for biodiversity policy: what happens when interventions designed to restore or protect nature end up weakening the customary systems that already sustain biodiverse landscapes? The discussion following the presentations highlighted the need to move beyond approaches that begin by assuming something is wrong in Indigenous and local land systems that require intervention. In many cases, the most important biodiversity action may be to recognise and secure the governance systems that are already in place.
Social Innovation and Collective Action in Mountain Social-Ecological Systems
The MRI also supported the session on Social Innovation and Collective Action in Socio-Ecological Systems for Transformative Change in Biodiversity Futures, convened by Mariana Melnykovych, a member of the MRI Science Leadership Council (SLC). The session examined how participatory governance, Living Labs, collective action and social innovation can support biodiversity-positive futures in agri-forest and mountain landscapes.
The session opened with a contribution from the MRI Coordination Office examining the role of the MRI in supporting social innovation and collective action in mountain social-ecological systems under global change. The presentation reflected on the MRI as a global research coordination network that does not directly implement biodiversity conservation actions, but works on the enabling conditions that shape biodiversity outcomes. These include knowledge co-production, working groups, synthesis activities, long-term research-practice interfaces and dialogue across scientific, local and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Mariana also contributed directly to the session through a case study on a developing mountain Living Lab in Törbel, Switzerland. Drawing on insights from the Horizon Europe RURACTIVE project, the presentation explored how smart, biodiversity-friendly and nature-positive solutions depend on more than isolated skills or technologies. Instead, transformative potential emerges from what the authors described as a “competence ecosystem” combining digital, technical, social, organisational, governance, financial and business-model capacities. The Törbel Living Lab illustrated how community members, researchers, practitioners and local authorities can work together to identify local competence gaps, build trust, and test solutions that support biodiversity recovery, climate resilience, social justice and inclusion.
Other presentations expanded these themes through further examples. A contribution from Parc Ela in Switzerland examined a farmer-run local food store as a Living Lab for resilient food systems, showing how collective action among farmers, artisans, local authorities, tourism actors and researchers can support local food-system transformation. The session also moved beyond the Alps. A case from Nan Province in northern Thailand used participatory land-use scenarios to co-develop pathways for bending the degradation curve in tropical mountain landscapes. This work showed how historical timelines, local memories and future scenarios can support collective learning and more balanced nature–people futures. A final presentation from the Scottish Highlands explored rewilding as a social-ecological transformation, showing how biodiversity restoration must be negotiated alongside cultural values, economic considerations, stakeholder perceptions and place-based practices.
Across the session, a common message emerged: transformative change for biodiversity depends not only on technical solutions, but on the social processes that allow people to imagine, negotiate and act on different futures. Living Labs, participatory scenarios and collective governance arrangements offer practical spaces where research, policy and local action can come together.
MRI Governing Body Contributions
The MRI’s presence at WBF also included oral presentations by members of our Governing Body.
Christian Rixen presented research on fine-scale tree cover changes in Switzerland over the past 40 years and their impacts on plant biodiversity. His presentation addressed a key mountain biodiversity issue: woody encroachment linked to agricultural abandonment. Using high-resolution vegetation height data across Switzerland, the study showed that tree and shrub expansion is occurring not only in the southern Alps, but also in central and northern Alpine habitats. These changes have significant consequences for species-rich habitats such as dry meadows, bogs and fens. The findings showed that plant species richness can decline even at the early stages of encroachment, highlighting the importance of land-use change for biodiversity conservation in mountain landscapes.
Adrienne Grêt-Regamey presented work on improving mid-range theory for conservation science. The contribution addressed a broader challenge that is highly relevant to the MRI’s work: how to connect abstract conservation theory with practice-based case studies in ways that can help anticipate when interventions may work, fail or backfire. The presentation proposed a modelling workflow based on social-ecological systems thinking, with applications to human–wildlife conflict and biodiversity as a public good in privately owned forests.
A Shared Message From WBF 2026
Across the MRI’s contributions to this years WBF, a shared theme stood out: biodiversity futures in mountains are inseparable from the social and institutional systems that shape land use, livelihoods and collective decision-making.
The mountain-governance workshop showed that secure tenure and customary governance are not side issues in biodiversity policy. They are part of the governance infrastructure that allows long-term stewardship to continue. The social innovation and collective action session showed that social innovation, Living Labs and collective action can create spaces for communities, researchers and policymakers to co-produce more biodiversity-positive futures. Contributions from the MRI Governing Body members further demonstrated the importance of long-term evidence, land-use change analysis and stronger conceptual tools for conservation science.
Together, these discussions reinforced the MRI’s role as a convening and connecting platform for mountain research. By linking place-based knowledge with global biodiversity debates, the MRI helps ensure that mountain regions are not treated as marginal spaces, but as central arenas for understanding and responding to global change.
At a time when biodiversity policy is increasingly focused on restoration, transformation and implementation, the mountain perspective offers an essential reminder: lasting biodiversity outcomes depend not only on what is done in landscapes, but on who has the authority, knowledge and security to shape their future.
Photo by Andreas Slotosch.