Risk and resilience research in mountains worldwide - review and reflections

Abstract

A life in mountains is exposed to more risks than a life in plains. To overcome the relatively harsh and hazard-prone living conditions, mountain communities developed great capacities to continuously adapt their livelihood strategies and to generate innovative solutions. They feature typical aspects of resilience, which help them to deal with multifaceted stresses and hazardous processes. As such, mountain societies are a useful object of study to understand what conditions foster community resilience and what constitutes a resilient society. The objective of this chapter is to investigate to what extent mountain-specific aspects of resilience are dealt with in the literature that investigates resilience in mountain areas. It strongly builds upon the literature review conducted by Wyss et al., which identified four key pillars of resilience research in general, and seven mountain-specific topics, in English-language literature available through the Scopus database. The here-presented paper adds to this review by further investigating how the different notions of resilience are employed in these four pillars of resilience research in mountains, including additional snowballed literature. It concludes that the application of resilience in the analyzed studies within a mountain context can broadly be grouped in three different categories representing different levels of theoretical depth or practical applicability. In many cases, the conceptualization of resilience remains one of a system or process “bouncing back” to a former state, whereas a more holistic conceptualization that takes a social-ecological systems approach would be more appropriate to guide transformative change. The assessment and evaluation of resilience in mountains can reveal what conditions and factors contribute to increased resilience in a system or community. However, in the literature there is a lack of research into methods or frameworks to evaluate resilience. As in mountain research in general, the scanned literature presented a disproportionate focus on better-known mountain regions (Alps, Rocky Mountains, Himalayas, Pamir, Andes) while lesser-known ranges remain underrepresented in peer-reviewed research. Considering the importance of mountain-specific aspects in fostering resilience among mountain communities, research into mountain resilience would be beneficial for furthering the understanding of the concept more broadly and developing a framework for its assessment and evaluation.