The Moving Mountains Summit: Collaboratively Redefining the Future of Mountain Environments and Society

Mountain environments provide critical resources - such as clean water, forests, food, and medicines - to over half of the world's population. Mountain systems are also facing some of the most extreme effects of climate change. This project will support the Moving Mountains Summit, an event that will advance scientific and practical knowledge regarding the future trajectories of mountain environments and human communities. The Summit's participants will take part in workshops to address key issues including food security, livelihoods, tourism, and energy and the connections among them. Participants will explore how people, policy, and science can team up to build resilience in the face of climate change, and catalyze changes toward a sustainable, equitable and secure future for mountain environments and societies. Indigenous peoples and knowledge will play a prominent role in the Summit and in identifying pathways toward the future. The Summit will thus make a substantive intellectual contribution to synergies among Indigenous knowledge, Western science, and other knowledge systems. It will also expand the process for how we do science and increase public participation in the scientific process.

The Moving Mountains Summit will leverage the synergistic power of science, local and Indigenous knowledge, business, policy and advocacy to build and strengthen enduring links between key players in mountains and address mountain environmental and community sustainability in the post-COVID world while facing accelerating effects of climate change.
The Summit will be a hybrid meeting with the in-person portion taking place at the Rocky Mountain Institute's Innovation Center in Basalt, Colorado, USA. For those who cannot attend the Colorado meeting, participants in different locations around the world can convene in-person at 'regional meet-up mountain-hubs' such as Kathmandu, Nepal and Huaraz, Peru. A fully supported online-only option will be available for those who are not able or choose not to travel. Summit outcomes will include: a clearly articulated and shared vision with metrics to assess progress; a theory of change and related "road map"; new partnerships across diverse actors and sectors; media products; peer-reviewed publications; a Summit Declaration of Values; and commitments to an Action Plan towards sustainable mountain futures. The Summit will help build collaborations among mountain researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and stakeholders by establishing the Mountain Sentinels network as a boundary spanning organization for meaningful and broad engagement among mountain Indigenous and western scientists and stakeholders, globally.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.