Special Characteristics of Mountain Environments :

Mountains are regarded as the home of gods, the abode of the ancestors, and centers of spiritualism to most religions and cultures of the world. Mountains are biodiversity "hotspots."

In the Himalayas alone, there are estimated to be over 25,000 plant species. Mountains harbor a high number of endemics (species that exist nowhere else on earth) largely due to the extreme heterogeneity of climates and soils, rapid elevation changes, variable directional orientation, and abundant microhabitats. Endemism is given a further boost due to the isolation of individual mountains as "sky islands".

Mountains are also centers of crop and agro biodiversity that provide natural laboratories and gene banks. Many of the world's most important food staples began as wild mountain species. They include maize (Mexican highlands), potato (Andes), rice (South Asian highlands), and wheat and barley (Zagros Mountains, Iran ).

Mountains are the water towers of humanity as more than half of the world's freshwater originates there. Much of this water is stored as snow and glaciers in mountains of high latitudes, even in the tropics. Mountains are the key upper watershed catchments and headwaters for all the rivers that sustain irrigation, hydropower, and transportation.

The distinctive character of mountains is partly owing to different altitudinal belts of vegetation largely brought about by changes in temperature. For example, East Africa's Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro both change radically from tropical rain forests at the base to a high-latitude tundra type of vegetation near the summit.

In the Himalayas , the northern aspects are cooler and moist. They are also under more forest cover than the southern aspects which are mostly inhabited and warm.

Mountain ecosystems are also among the most fragile. While the focus of the world environmental community in the last decade was on the lowland tropical forests of the Amazon basin, more than 90 percent of the montane forests disappeared from the northern Andes . Mountains manifest powerful processes of uplift, erosion, volcanoes, earthquakes and landslides, torrents and rock-falls due to tectonic and topographic processes. Mountains are in a continual state of change, sometimes at extremely rapid rates.

When human-induced changes are factored in, mountain environments become even more at risk. The mountain environment has low resilience and is slow in recovering from any disturbance to soils, vegetation, fauna, and landscape.

Mountain ranges are often frontiers between states or nations and as such have been and are today the scene of national and international tension, transboundary refugee conflicts, and even warfare. On the other hand, they offer singular opportunities for the establishment of abutting trans-border cooperation to garner ecological, economic, social, and cultural benefits.

Finally, mountains are outflow areas of people and products of the land. Soil, fuel-wood, timber, minerals, agricultural products, game, and non-wood forest products move down-slope to the lowlands, even as young and skilled people also migrate to the lowlands in search of opportunities. Those who are left behind in many mountain regions are often older people, predominantly women.

Continuing challenges for mountain communities poverty : Worldwide, people dwelling in mountain regions are among the poorest of the poor. A significant number of the 1.3 billion people living on less than one US dollar a day are mountain residents. Many of the least developed countries are mountainous (e.g. Nepal , Laos , Ethiopia , Bolivia , Rwanda , Papua New Guinea , and Albania ). Of the 592 counties in China listed to have people living below the poverty line, 496 are in mountainous areas.

Disasters and social strife: The economic miseries of mountain people are compounded by natural disasters such as floods, landslides, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

Logging and fuel wood: The linkages between fuel wood collection and mountain forest degradation is apparent in many parts of the Himalayan, East African, and Andean mountain ranges. About 15 percent of primary energy supplies in many developing countries comes from wood fuel in mountain forests. However, commercial logging remains the biggest threat to natural mountain habitats, particularly in the montane tropical and cloud forests. Upland forests in the tropics are disappearing faster than lowland forests. The loss is estimated to be about 1.1% per annum, a rate higher than any biomes.

The barren slopes in the mountains of Luzon in the Philippines and Mount Elgon in Uganda provide glaring examples of some of the ravages of mountain ecosystems. Impacts from logging are both on site and off. They include excessive felling and construction of access roads, skidding tracts, and other means of extraction from the felling-site to the market.

World Bank studies show that most of the timber harvested in Albania comes from rugged terrain with slopes ranging from 20 to 50 percent, indicating that logging may not be a viable option. In Malaysia , silviculture practices adopted from experiences in lowland forest were found inappropriate for hill forests. Commercial exploitation in the mountains of Northern India not only ravaged the mountain environment but also triggered social alienation, prompting the Chipko movement, where local people risked their lives and embraced trees to prevent logging. This movement was instrumental in changing perceptions on the role of mountain ecosystems to incorporate social and ecological functions like soil, water, watershed, and carbon sink services.

Hydropower development: Since the early part of this century, mountain habitats, particularly the deeper river valleys, have provided ideal engineering sites for large hydropower construction. Besides submerging large tracts, this construction brings roads and new settlements causing further environmental degradation. Yet, the main consumers and beneficiaries of these enterprises tend to be lowland and urban dwellers, not the people of the mountains. Concerns for environmental degradation and inequity in benefit sharing have caused social tensions and conflicts in many countries.

Mining: Mining and the infrastructure development that accompanies it have major direct

impacts on the mountain environment. The Andes produce nearly one-fifth of the world's

copper, lead, and zinc. Most of the tin consumed in the world today comes from the rug-

ged mountain ranges of Bolivia . The western cordilleras of the Americas produce nearly half of the world's silver. The mountains of Papua New Guinea are not only home to some of the world's most pristine tropical montane forests, but also some of its largest gold reserves. These minerals often have higher market value than forest products.

Tourism and roads: Mountains are a magnet to a segment of the burgeoning US$3.4 trillion tourism trade that is estimated to grow to US$ 7.2 trillion and employ 338 million people by year 2005. Montane cloud forests are being replaced by casinos, hotels, and golf courses in the Genting and Cameron Highlands of peninsular Malaysia and Mount Kinabalu in Sabah .

The Karakoram Highway that links Pakistan with the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, the Tribhuvan Highway of Nepal , and the Kodari Highway that links the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu with the Tibetan Capital of

Lhasa have, without question, impacted the mountain environment. Yet, they also have propelled nature-based, adventure tourism, and catalyzed the construction of schools and rural medical facilities needed for development.

Research on alternatives and options to minimize their impacts on mountain forests werenever a part of their design and construction.

Air pollution and climate change: Air-pollution recognizes no frontiers and is known for long-distance transmission. Acid rain, photochemical smog, and metal deposition from pre-cipitation are also seriously affecting once impenetrable and isolated mountain habitats.