Mountain glacial and paraglacial environments under global climate change: lessons from the past, future directions and policy implications

Abstract

Globally, glacial and paraglacial environments in mountains are vulnerable to the effects of ongoing contemporary climate change (global warming), but monitoring of such systems today provides only a limited spatial and temporal viewpoint of their likely evolution over coming decades to centuries. This is because these environments show complex and nonlinear responses to forcing and are affected by time lags, feedbacks and antecedent factors, including geologic control and geologic history that present monitoring of these systems cannot capture. In order to evaluate how glacial and paraglacial environments in mountains are likely to respond to future climate change, we consider how these environments have responded to climate change in the past (the last glacial–interglacial transition, and the Little Ice Age). From this, we may anticipate the likely responses of glacial and paraglacial environments in mountains to global warming over coming decades. We show that future changes in glacial and paraglacial environments, in particular in glaciated regions in continental interiors, have downstream implications for the biosphere (including biodiversity and ecosystem services, sustainable agriculture and water resources), the human environment (including cultural and heritage landscapes and social/economic activities), and for policy and planning. These will be important issues for the later twenty‐first century and beyond.

Key words:

• climate change
• paraglacial
• mountains
• Little Ice Age
• late Pleistocene
• glaciers

Acknowledgements

This paper benefitted from detailed and incisive comments by Christian Huggel and an anonymous reviewer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jasper Knight

Jasper Knight, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa

Email: [email protected]

Stephan Harrison

Stephan Harrison, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Penryn, TR10 9EZ, UK

Email: [email protected]