Invited speaker Ana Ochoa-Sánchez graduated in Civil Engineering and holds a master’s and a doctoral degree in Water Resources. She joined the MRI’s Mentoring and Training Programme in IPCC Processes for Early Career Mountain Researches in 2019, where she had the opportunity to become a contributing author for the AR6 IPCC Report, Mountains Chapter. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the University of Azuay. Her research interests include ecohydrology and climate change.

In this lecture, Ana discusses evidence of observed changes in natural and human systems in the Andes (detection) and their attribution to anthropogenic climate change. Mountains are among the areas most vulnerable to climate change impacts; therefore, monitoring the advance of anthropogenic influence in the climate and consequently on physical (cryosphere and water), biological (agriculture, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems), and human (energy, disasters, tourism, migration, human health and community changes and cultural values) systems is important to advance our understanding of complex interactions among those systems to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference and develop and implement better adaptation responses to climate change.

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Image by Christian Ibarra.

Invited speaker Gabrielle Vance is a Scientific Project Officer at the MRI. In addition to her B.A. and M.S. in geology, she has more than a decade of experience editing scientific manuscripts for international researchers. She also teaches English and has earned CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and SVEB (Switzerland Association for Continuing Education) certifications.

Communicating science is simple, but not easy. In this lecture, Gabrielle illustrates four principles of effective scientific English with examples from recent MRI publications. These principles apply across disciplines and at multiple levels, from sentences to manuscripts. She shares concrete suggestions based on common challenges and recommends helpful resources. 

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Download the presentation slides here.

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Image by Peter Kummli.

Invited speaker James Thornton joined the Mountain Research Initiative in 2020 upon completion of his PhD in hydrogeology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His doctoral research focused on the interdisciplinary, physics-based numerical modelling of hydrological processes in complex Alpine terrain, and involved a wide range of datasets and computational tools. Prior to that, James worked in the reinsurance sector, where he was responsible for leading the development of natural catastrophe models in order to quantify the risks associated with extreme events such as floods and tropical cyclones. He is currently responsible for the coordination and implementation of GEO Mountains, a GEO Initiative seeking to increase the availability and accessibility of a wide range of data pertaining to mountainous regions to benefit human societies and ecosystems globally.

In this presentation, James describes some of the initial steps that have recently been undertaken towards establishing a set of interdisciplinary climate-related variables (so-called Essential Mountain Climate Variables, EMCVs) that should be prioritised for systematic observation across mountain regions globally in order to provide more uniform reporting information and build more reliable predictive models. He also provides an outlook on possibilities to either strengthen the measurement of EMCVs, or else exploit existing EMCV data more efficiently. One approach, combining in situ and remotely sensed observations, is exemplified with respect to a distributed, energy-balanced based snow model. Finally, future steps towards the concept’s formalisation – to which the community is warmly invited to contribute – is proposed. 

View the lecture in full below:

Download the presentation slides here. To see the animations, please view the recording. 

Take the brief EMCVs suvey here. 

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Image by Pete. 

Invited speaker Ignacio Palomo is Laureate of the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) Research Program at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the University of Grenoble-Alps in France. His research focuses on human-nature interactions and nature-based adaptation to climate change in mountain social-ecological systems. He is part of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA).

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes towards sustainability, but empirical studies of large datasets that assess transformative change are scarce. During this lecture Palomo outlines how, through an MRI Synthesis Workshop, he and his fellow researchers developed a framework to evaluate how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) may contribute to transformative change. The framework enables the assessment of what may catalyse transformative change, how transformative change occurs, and what the main outcomes are. After applying this to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES) globally, the researchers found that NbS are as much ‘people-based’ as ‘nature-based.’ As Palomo outlines in his lecture, most NbS are based on four elements with transformation potential: nature’s values, knowledge types, community engagement, and nature management practices. He illustrates how the elements of the framework interact through a classification of NbS typologies, and stresses that the framework provides key components for assessing the effectiveness of NbS and allows the tracking of long-term transformative change processes.

The framework is outlined in the journal article ‘Assessing Nature-Based Solutions for Transformative Change,’ which was published in One Earth in May 2021.

View the lecture in full below:

Download the presentation slides here. 

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Cover image by loic Tijsseling.