MRI News

The MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group hosted a successful summer school in Ostana, Italy and online, from 5-12 June 2021. 

'Designing for Resiliency: RE:GENERATE alpine-urban circularity' was an experiential educational co-creation hybridizing science, design, social outdoor joy, and local action organized by ETH Zurich, EPFL Lausanne, and the MonViso Institute and partnering with The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, TU Delft, and Politecnico Torino. The instructional team included MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group Co-Leads Tobias Luthe and Romano Wyss, with institutional support from MRI Co-PI Adrienne Grêt-Regamey

The third event in the MRI Anniversary Lecture Series took place this month, celebrating 20 years since the MRI Coordination Office was founded in 2001. This series aims to showcase MRI synthesis workshop research and build capacity in the mountain research community.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2021 will be held in New Orleans, USA and online from 13-17 December 2021. The AGU Fall Meeting is the leading forum for advancing Earth and space science and leveraging this research toward solutions for societal challenges. The MRI is convening an exciting mountain-focused session.

Abstract submission deadline 4 August 2021.

The MRI's session at the Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2021 highlighted examples of how key components of risk are accounted for in mountain contexts, and their implications for sustainability. 

The Sustainability Research & Innovation Congress 2021 (SRI2021) took place June 12-15. As part of this virtual event, MRI Executive Director Carolina Adler and Scientific Project Officer Gabrielle Vance convened the session 'Addressing Systemic Risks in Social-Ecological Systems: Mountains as Contexts for Evidence and Action.' The session included presentations by MRI SLC member Irasema Alcántara-Ayala, University of Innsbruck Professor Margreth Keiler, and University of California, Berkeley PhD student Kate Cullen

Hard and soft plastics are the most common types of waste encountered at altitude by mountaineers, the first survey of its kind has found — with two-thirds of mountaineers spotting litter most or every time they set foot on a mountain.

A new article published in the journal One Earth proposes a set of potential Essential Mountain Climate Variables to support the monitoring and understanding of key climate change-related mountain processes. The article builds upon a workshop organized by GEO Mountains and hosted by the MRI.

Climate change is having a range of effects on mountain environments and the critically important ecosystems services they provide. Decision-makers rely on the mountain research community to monitor, understand, and predict possible future changes in these complex, interacting processes. For instance, global assessments, local and regional climate modeling, and climate change adaptation and mitigation all require consistent, long-term, and inter-comparable environmental observations. 

New research maps English-language scientific journal articles that analyze the climate change adaptation options planned or implemented in European mountain regions – and finds key knowledge gaps in academic literature that need to be addressed. MRI Executive Director Carolina Adler is among the authors. 

European mountain regions have already been impacted by climate change, and this is projected to increase in the future. These mountain regions experience rapid changes, which influence social-ecological systems in the lower-mountain and floodplain regions of Europe. However, there is scattered evidence across different strands of academic literature on the ways in which the impacts of changing climate in mountain regions are addressed and adaptive capacity is enhanced.

A new study investigates how eleven global sustainability-oriented research networks – the MRI among them – can effectively contribute to co-production of knowledge and action towards sustainability transformations, and introduces a strategic tool to support this process.

An increasing number of voices highlight the need for science itself to transform and to engage in the co-production of knowledge and action in order to enable the fundamental transformations needed to advance towards sustainable futures. But how can global sustainability-oriented research networks engage in co-production of knowledge and action?

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