High Mountain Data

Co-Leads

 

Himani Upadhyay

Researcher
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Germany

 

Kenza Tazi

PhD student
University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey
England

 

Jakob Steiner

Geoscientist
Based in Pakistan

Proposal

Making decisions and communicating evidence requires data – accessible data. This is especially true when talking about risks and when we need to see the bigger picture of challenges that cross borders. Data is crucial to understand the past impacts of hazards on economies and livelihoods and projections of climate and socio-economic changes. Data can tell stories on how our mountains are changing in local and global media and drives narratives that are crucial to support future decision-making.

International monitoring bodies on glaciers, snow, water, population, health, and infrastructure rely on regional initiatives to indicate where the gaps in data and hence support global initiatives to fund data collection and curation. Furthermore, data is also only useful when stakeholders and decision makers trust them. This is why it is crucial that the process in retrieving, creating, curating, and sharing data is transparent.

Recent years have seen rapid development in the production of (big) data in both the natural (e.g. landslides) and social sciences (e.g. population data). There is a need to make the data FAIR, free, accessible, interoperable, and retrievable. However, in mountain regions that are often topographically complex and relatively remote, large-scale datasets are difficult to create and validate. At the same time, the necessity to include Indigenous and local knowledge in data creation is also being increasingly appreciated. This, however, results in data formats becoming increasingly heterogenous.