Mountainous regions: laboratories for adaptation

IHDP Update issue 2, 2008

The signals of climate change are particularly visible in mountains, exactly because of the mountains' verticality. The verticality of mountains defies gravity, setting up an epic conflict mediated by a host of geomorphic processes such as erosion, rockfalls, landslides, debris flows, glacier depositions, floods, and avalanches. Mountain landscapes are, compared to the slow changes in lowlands, incredibly frenetic, as water and earth materials pushed skyward by tectonic forces are stripped from the surface and rushed to the sea. All of these geomorphic processes are influenced by global change, especially changes in climate and land cover. Global warming is melting permafrost in steep mountain faces, leading to an increase in rockfall and in debris flows. Changes in land cover can, when coupled with seismic events, themselves highly correlated with mountains, lead to an increase in slope failure, sometimes with catastrophic human impacts.