
Planting fruit trees to help diversify livelihoods in Ethopia’s Bale Mountains. Photo credit: Rob Marchant
In a collaboration extending over five years, the Afri-Mont network, led by Dr. Aida Cuni-Sanchez and colleagues, including members of the Mountain Sentinels Alliance, have worked with over 1,500 farmers to gather the knowledge needed to develop context-appropriate recommendations on priority actions aimed at improving climate change adaptation in Africa’s mountain regions. Evidence presented in the research paper “Perceived climate change impact and adaptation responses in ten African mountain regions” published in Nature Climate Change (January, 2025) forms the basis for a policy brief released this month by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) led by Dr. Noelia Zafra-Calvo. Recommendations in the policy brief, “Climate Change in African Mountains: An Increasing Challenge and Contribution of Local Adaptation Responses” aim to facilitate locally driven and culturally appropriate adaptation strategies that involve local communities in the decision-making process. Priorities include improving access to credit, technical skills and markets; increasing knowledge exchange among actors; and considering the unintended effects of regional conflicts and national policies on farmers and pastoralists.
Dr. Aida Cuni-Sanchez – Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and University of York, Honorary Fellow – is a longtime member of the Mountain Sentinels community and an organizer of the research collaboration network known as Afri-Mont. For this project, she worked with researchers and graduate students across ten African mountain regions in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Tanzania.
Members of the research team include three former Mountain Sentinels Fellows: Rodrigue Batumike (DRC), Ben Mwangi (Kenya) and Nisha Jha (Nepal); Mountain Sentinels’ long-term collaborator, Dr. Rob Marchant, Director of the York Institute for Tropical Ecosystems within the Environment Department, University of York (community spotlight Sep. 2024); Dr. Lydia Olaka, anticipated leader of the Mountain Sentinels Africa Collab; Dr. Jessica Thorn, former Mountain Sentinels postdoctoral Fellow; and Mountain Sentinels lead, Dr. Julia Klein.
Cuni-Sanchez’ collaboration with Mountain Sentinels began in 2016, when Marchant and Klein co-sponsored Cuni-Sanchez’s Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. The focus of her Fellowship was “African Sky Forests: services, threats and management recommendations, which focused on the understudied mountain regions of eastern DRC and western Cameroon, both having conflict.” Cuni-Sanchez stayed at Colorado State University for two of the three years of her fellowship. Cuni-Sanchez also served as a mentor to some of the first Mountain Sentinels’ Fellows cohort. At that time, Klein et al, including Marchant and Cuni-Sanchez, sent out one of the first multi-lingual surveys to global mountain experts representing 57 mountain sites worldwide; the recent Nature Climate Change paper in part draws on this type of synthesis approach at a regional scale. During spring semester 2024, Colorado State University hosted Dr. Cuni-Sanchez as a “Rising Star Distinguished Ecologist” for her research, which was the first to document compositional shifts in African mountain forests related to climate change.
The recent research was born from a small MRI conference grant that originally aimed to gather fifteen African scholars working in African mountain regions for a listening forum in 2019 for the purpose of better understanding of climate change impacts in African mountains. Knowledge of climate behavior in these regions has been extremely limited due to a lack of historical meteorological data, but it was felt that many gaps in knowledge could be filled by listening to local communities who have lived in the same place for generations, and hold detailed knowledge of their environment, including climate. When plans for the workshop were derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the collaborators opted to develop a protocol and questionnaire and work with local Masters students in order to meet knowledge keepers and stakeholders where they lived and worked. Overall, the team contacted 1,500 farmers speaking 12 different languages in 40 villages located in 10 mountains across tropical Africa.

Small tea plantations and wood lots used to diversify livelihoods in the Kigezi Highlands in Uganda. Photo credit: Aida Cuni-Sanchez
Observed changes to climate include increased temperatures, reduced fog, changes in rainfall amount and distribution, an increase in extreme droughts, fewer hailstorms, and increased wind
strength during the rainy season. The reports of reduced fog warrant further study, as they are evidence of a complex interplay of meteorological conditions and could have the effect of an overall reduction of water in affected regions. These changes were noted to manifest in increased challenges such as worsening water shortages, an increase of pests and diseases in people and livestock, damaging agricultural harvests, and even landscape changes such as reduced stream flow and increased landslides.
The paper also shows that African mountain communities are employing a wide range of adaptation strategies, including changing farming practices such as adopting new crop varieties, investing in water and soil management, using agrochemicals, and using more veterinary care. In some mountains farmers are diversifying livelihoods by starting animal rearing or getting involved in vegetable farming. However, the paper also highlights that the number and type of adaptation responses and character of responses varies significantly across the ten mountains, underlining that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to climate change impacts does not work. Indeed, the paper shows a clear need for the knowledge an input of local actors to be included in mitigation strategies and actions.
Mountain Sentinels strives to enable pathways toward sustainability through knowledge exchanges and through fostering collaboration across mountain regions worldwide. We appreciate the knowledge keepers, community members, coordinators, students, researchers, and funders who made this collaboration possible. Together, we can move mountains!