Climate Change and Water in Mountains: A Global Concern

What is climate change? How are mountain regions affected by the evolution of water resources and their uses? What kind of risks need to be considered?

Mountains are recognized as particularly sensitive physical environments where intense and rapid changes have in the past, and may increasingly in the future, place pressure on their resource base. In this context, a team of roughly 100 experts worked from 2008 to 2013 for the European ACQWA project ( ?url=www.acqwa.ch&module=edu&id=1626" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">?url=www.acqwa.ch&module=edu&id=1626" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">www.acqwa.ch ) which was coordinated by the University of Geneva. The primary objectives of the project were to assess the impacts of a changing climate on the quantity and quality of water originating in mountain regions, particularly where snow- and ice melt represent a large, sometimes the largest, streamflow component. A further objective of the project was to determine the potential disruptions to water-dependent economic activities related to the climate impacts on hydrological systems, and to propose a portfolio of possible adaptation strategies.

Since 2013, the University has been producing "massive open online courses" (MOOCs). These are university-level online courses that are scripted and structured around content, learning activities, interactions and assessments. They are open to everybody, without access-restrictions based on age, profession or level of study.

This initiative aims to make courses from the best universities in the world available to everybody, with monitoring and assessment requirements as high as for regular students. Launched in 2011 by computer science professors at Stanford University, MOOCs now have several hundred million students worldwide. The universities involved in this process include some of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

The University of Geneva’s MOOCs are offered on the Coursera platform .

Les termes utilisés pour désigner des personnes sont pris au sens générique; ils ont à la fois la valeur d’un masculin et d’un féminin.