Adaptation at Altitude

Mountains feature some of the clearest indications of climate change: rising temperatures, melting glaciers and changing precipitation patterns are disrupting water flows and affecting ecosystems, creating and worsening natural hazards and threatening livelihoods and communities both within the mountains and downstream. Mountain livelihoods are particularly sensitive to climate change, because climate impacts are often more profound in mountains and affect people already confronting poverty and land degradation.

Mountain people have always faced the challenges of living in a rugged environment and have developed coping strategies to adapt to harsh conditions, but the unprecedented magnitude and speed of climate change puts them under increasing pressure.

The Adaptation at Altitude programme seeks to increase the resilience and adaptive capacity of mountain communities and ecosystems to climate change by:

• improving knowledge of appropriate climate change adaptation strategies in the mountains;
• transferring knowledge through science–policy platforms to inform decision-making in national, regional and global policy processes.

Adaptation at Altitude fosters exchange among the mountain areas of the world and seeks short and long-term solutions to the problems arising from climate change.

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