The extensive mountain ranges in the Ethiopian highlands and the scattered high #mountains in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania support extremely fragmented faunas and floras that have fascinated generations of #biogeographers. These mountains are renowned for their peculiar giant rosette plants and charismatic mammals, high species richness, high number of endemics, adaptations to warm days and frosty nights, and complex evolutionary histories including recruitment from various remote regions of the world. These mountains constitute one of the 36 global #biodiversity hotspots, the Eastern Afromontane hotspot, which has high #conservation priority is probably the hottest of these biodiversity hotspots. #Climate warming will cause more extreme events such as heavy rainstorms, floods, fires, and tropical storms, and widespread droughts and heatwaves will affect ecological services and livelihood of peoples. Other threats include habitat fragmentation, overgrazing, and climate-change-driven fires that can determine the altitude of the forest-line on mountains. Human population pressure, and how this interacts with a changing climate, represent immediate risks for species extinctions and loss of genetic diversity and suitable habitats. For example, at least seven major flash floods have affected the catchments of the #Rwenzori Mountains during the past 50 years, resulting from cascading and interacting hazards such as crop damage, fires, and landslides. Understanding how these interactions have evolved and then designing active responses that link knowledge on climate change with historic land-use transformation and stakeholder perception is more important than reactive responses and is explored in a new chapter in a book published Elsevier 'Safeguarding Mountain Social-Ecological Systems' (ISBN: 978-0-443-32824-4). Mountain Research Initiative (MRI)Mountain Partnership of the United Nations Mountain Sentinels York Environmental Sustainability Institute (YESI)
