A new review article describes resilience as transforming a system to make it stronger, more adaptable and more innovative.
‘Mountain Resilience: A systemic literature review and paths to the future’, published today by Mountain Research and Development (MRD), provides a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature in English on resilience-related topics in mountain areas. This is the first time a review of this kind has been done specifically in relation to mountains.
The paper is a key output of the MRI Mountain Resilience Working Group, co-led by Tobias Luthe (ETH Zurich PLUS / AHO Oslo / Monviso Institute, Italy) and Romano Wyss (EPFL). Wyss and Luthe are co-lead authors of the paper along with support from 13 other working group co-authors.
The paper identifies key pillars of the resilience discourse. The authors explore what resilience can mean in different contexts with respect to different topic areas – and the challenge to bridge these understandings. Based on the paper’s review, resilience today is about going beyond shock absorption to transforming a setting or system to make the community stronger, as both more adaptive and more innovative.
Community science, warm data, urban-alpine synergies, and deliberate transformation in the real world as future research paths
The authors propose a structured starting point for science-practice interactions and concrete action-based activities to support livelihoods and strengthen resilience in mountain areas. They highlight four research avenues for further exploration: deliberate transformation, mountain-urban synergies, real-world laboratories, and local knowledge. In their view, observing social and ecological change by connecting scientists, practitioners, inhabitants, and visitors will increase the impact of mountain resilience research initiatives.
“We want to move away from a purely technical, scientific reporting of resilience to an approach where one engages with the people who are at the heart of the place (or system) and have built resilience over hundreds or thousands of years,” said Luthe. “It’s really about working with stakeholder groups in mountain areas and integrating community in future research, adhering to a new kind of holistic engagement as part of co-designing resilience in the real world.”
The paper offers an example of ‘local knowledge’ and ‘warm data’ through community science, where mountain guides can be motivated and enabled to report their impressions from glacier environments, while lay-people can be asked to take photos of environmental hazards and share these documentations with others via online platforms.
Indeed, this is just one avenue where the Mountain Resilience Working Group hopes to go next.
Wyss R., Luthe T., Pedoth L., Schneiderbauer S., Adler C., Apple M., Acosta E. E., Fitzpatrick H., Haider J., Ikizer G., Imperiale A.J., Karanci N., Posch E., Saidmamatov O., T. Thaler. 2022. Mountain Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review and Paths to the Future. Mountain Research and Development, 42(2), A23-A36. external pagehttps://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-21-00044.1
