Session 27: Mountains as contexts for global change: interdisciplinary experiences, challenges and new perspectives across the natural and social sciences.

Mountain regions offer concrete contexts through which challenges and opportunities of global change are experienced, perceived and enacted. The complex interactions between diverse biophysical and socio-economic processes of change call for an integrated systems approach to not only understand these challenges, but also identify key opportunities. Combining knowledge streams across the natural and social sciences, accounting for the complexity of social-ecological interactions are increasingly called for in mountain research as a response to this call. However, this is easier said than done. Contrasting research objects, methods, epistemological paradigms and evaluation criteria pose significant challenges for a sound integration between both. This is even more so the case when expectations to address societal challenges, leverage opportunities and co-design solutions are encouraged through transdisciplinary research. Moreover, it is not clear whether and how an integration between the natural and the social sciences contribute to “better” outcomes in terms of sustainable development, transformative capacity, and justice. This symposium aims at offering a space to showcase research conducted in mountain areas that address these topics, discuss such challenges as well as identify emerging new avenues for research and collaboration among natural and social scientists dealing with global change issues in mountain regions