Mountains feature some of the clearest indications of climate change: rising temperatures, melting glaciers and changing precipitation patterns, which are disrupting water flows and affecting ecosystems, creating and worsening natural hazards and threatening livelihoods and communities both within the mountains and downstream.
The Adaptation at
Altitude Solutions Portal has been designed to support the sharing and transfer of knowledge on interventions that are helping to reduce vulnerability and climate risk in the mountains. The Portal provides easy access to information on tried, tested, and replicable solutions, making these solutions easier to find, explore, and appraise for everyone working on this topic.
The Portal is also specifically designed to give visibility and recognition to solution contributors and enable potential adopters of solutions to connect with those who have implemented these solutions in the field.
The Portal is open to contributions from all actors working in mountains, and these are welcomed and encouraged to share their implemented solutions. Details of guidance and support to enable this are
available here.
Prior to publishing, solutions are evaluated according to the evaluation criteria. This criteria is
published here. The ‘
solutions’ in the Portal include technologies, approaches, and/or processes to adjust natural or human systems to actual or expected climate impacts, in order to reduce expected losses or harness benefits. The diverse array of solutions in the Portal ranges from community-based initiatives to early warning systems to education programmes to land restoration and many more.
The solutions can be filtered by scales of implementation, ecosystem types, solution types, and impacts addressed. They incorporate disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and ecosystem restoration approaches.
Solutions in the Portal contain key information to support its replication in and tailoring to other contexts, including:
- Who the solution benefits
- Its target and reported outcomes
- Which SDGs and Sendai Framework goals it addresses
- How it was planned, implemented, and funded
- What is innovative about it
- How its performance has been evaluated and what the results of this are
- Its long-term sustainability including actions taken to ensure its sustainability
- The capacities required for its successful implementation, including knowledge, technology, political, institutional and socio-cultural capacities
- Its outlook and potential for scaling and transformation
- What barriers and adverse effects have been observed and actions taken to mitigate these, and
- Links to supporting and relevant resources and documentation
The Adaptation at Altitude (A@A) Solutions Portal is being developed through the Adaptation at Altitude programme, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which seeks to support mountain communities and those working with them by improving the knowledge of appropriate climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies in the mountains, and transferring that knowledge through science–policy platforms to inform decision-making in national, regional and global policy processes.