The sixth event in the MRI Anniversary Lecture Series took place today, celebrating 20 years since the MRI Coordination Office was founded in 2001. This series aims to showcase MRI synthesis workshop research and build capacity in the mountain research community.

Invited speaker Ana Ochoa-Sánchez graduated in Civil Engineering and holds a master’s and a doctoral degree in Water Resources. She joined the MRI’s Mentoring and Training Programme in IPCC Processes for Early Career Mountain Researches in 2019, where she had the opportunity to become a contributing author for the AR6 IPCC Report, Mountains Chapter. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the University of Azuay. Her research interests include ecohydrology and climate change.

In this lecture, Ana discusses evidence of observed changes in natural and human systems in the Andes (detection) and their attribution to anthropogenic climate change. Mountains are among the areas most vulnerable to climate change impacts; therefore, monitoring the advance of anthropogenic influence in the climate and consequently on physical (cryosphere and water), biological (agriculture, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems), and human (energy, disasters, tourism, migration, human health and community changes and cultural values) systems is important to advance our understanding of complex interactions among those systems to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference and develop and implement better adaptation responses to climate change.

View the lecture in full below:

Image by Christian Ibarra.