BE/CNH: Global Change, Globalization, and the Vulnerability of Mountain Systems

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Mountain regions provide a unique and important setting within which to examine the interplay of global climate change and globalization. This project seeks to strengthen an international, interdisciplinary research network whose goal is to advance understandings of the dynamics of coupled natural and human systems by characterizing the sources of vulnerability of mountain systems to the combined effects of global warming and global economic restructuring. The strategy underlying the project is to develop research ties among scientists from multiple disciplines studying two mountain regions where the individual impacts of climate change and globalization are already strongly manifest and well documented. These regions are: the Greater Yellowstone Region in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho in the United States and the Mount Kilimanjaro Region in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. and African scientists from the natural and social sciences will meet at workshops held in Montana and Kenya to address a range of emerging questions, such as how biophysical heterogeneity and diversity of institutional arrangements and economic strategies in mountain systems may enhance, reduce, or change in kind and scale the vulnerability of these regions to climate change. Participants from mountain regions in Asia, Europe, and South America also will be invited to participate in these workshops as a first step in expanding the research network globally.This project will lay the groundwork to develop a global research strategy to address the vulnerability of mountain systems to the interacting influences of global change and globalization. Scientifically, mountain regions provide an ideal setting to develop comparative case studies of differential impacts of global change and globalization given that mountain regions are distributed all over the globe, from the Equator almost to the poles and from oceanic to highly continental climates and are experiencing globalization at widely varying rates. Mountain regions also are critically important in assessing the impacts of global change given that they occupy about one-fifth of the Earth's surface and provide goods and services to about half of humanity. This project is an award emanating from the FY 2001 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.