Overview
Understanding how to recognise, engage and empower frontline communities – while enhancing their proactive agency to reduce disaster and climate change risks – is key for development interventions to be socially sustainable and achieve the 2030 Agenda. This is especially true in mountain regions, where local communities live on the frontlines of intensifying climate hazards yet remain crucial to safeguarding and restoring these fragile environments.
Grounded in an integrated social science approach, we define mountain community resilience as the set of communities’ resources, services, and adaptive, coping and transformative capacities, processes, actions and behaviours that comprise mountain communities’ proactive agency. This agency materialises through transformative learning from crises, disasters and past interventions, and enables communities to reduce vulnerabilities, respond to impacts, and enhance community wellbeing. This framing recognises that communities are internally diverse, and that community resilience and vulnerability are shaped by planned interventions, power dynamics and unequal resource access.
The MRI Global Mountain Community Resilience Working Group strengthens MRI’s role as a global hub for researchers, practitioners and NGOs working with and for mountain communities around the world. It aims to enhance MRI’s international contribution to advancing understanding of how mountain communities can be engaged and empowered, and how community resilience can be enhanced and disaster risk reduction, climate action and socially sustainable development achieved in mountain regions.
Established: 2026
Current Phase: First Phase
The MRI Working Groups are open to all members of the MRI network. Information on how to join can be found at the bottom of this page.
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How to Join
MRI Working Groups are community-led initiatives open to all members of the MRI network. Researchers and practitioners from all backgrounds and career stages are welcome to participate. Early career researchers (typically within five years of completing a postgraduate degree), women, and colleagues from developing countries and underrepresented mountain regions are particularly encouraged to get involved.
The first step to joining an MRI Working Group is becoming part of the MRI network. You can do this by creating a profile in the MRI Expert Database. By joining the network, you become part of a vibrant international community of more than 10,000 experts working across research, policy, and practice, united by a shared commitment to mountain regions worldwide.
As a member of the MRI network, you can apply for MRI funding opportunities, participate in Working Groups, and engage in a range of collaborative activities.
Once you have joined the MRI network by adding your profile to the MRI Expert Database, you can become a member of the Mountain Socio-Ecological Futures Working Group by completing the form below. You will be added to the Working Group mailing list and receive updates on research collaborations, events, knowledge exchange activities, and other opportunities to contribute to the group’s work.
If you have any questions about the Working Group or its activities, please contact one of the Working Group Co-Leads listed above.