http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1024-03.htm
Published on Thursday,
October 24, 2002 by the Guardian/UK
Mountain Cultures in Grave Danger Says
UN
by John Vidal
Mountain people around the world, including parts of Europe,
are in great danger of losing their cultures and being caught
by conflict and environmental degradation, according to a UN report.
As global warming and
deforestation accelerated, and technology
made wild places accessible, environmental and social pressures
on the remotest regions were mounting, said the authors from
the World Conservation monitoring center in Cambridge.
They found that many
mountainous regions - officially inhabited
by one in five of the population, according to the UN, were
barely recognizable when compared with 60 years ago, mostly
because forests had been felled to make way for cattle grazing
and agriculture.
Almost half of Africa's
upland areas had been put under the
plough or the hoof, and been made susceptible to fire and human
conflict.
This land use change,
said the report, had increased rapidly
with globalization. It was adversely affecting soils, regional
climates, and water supplies for lowland areas. If trends
continued, said the report, the fabled snows of Kilimanjaro
in east Africa would have all melted within 30 years.
Greenland's icy mountains
were expected to be the region
hardest hit by global warming. The authors expected 98% of
its mountain areas to experience severe climate change by
2055.
"These losses
are not just regrettable but actually threaten
the health and well-being of us all. Mountains are the water
towers of the world, from where the world's rivers spring.
We must act to conserve them for the benefit of mountain people,
for the benefit of humankind," said Klaus Toepfer, head of
the
UN's environment program, yesterday.
The report also found
that more than 40% of the world's mountain
regions had experienced violent conflict since 1945, compared
to 26% of lowland areas. In Africa 67% of the mountainous land
had suffered "high intensity conflict".
"Mountains give
strategic advantage to insurgents by providing
places of refuge. The terrain hinders road building, thereby
restricting law enforcement. A lack of infrastructure can make
civil war more likely or prolonged," said Adrian Newton,
lead
author of the report.
Mr Newton questioned
the land use policies of many countries,
which encouraged intensification of agriculture in mountain
regions. "These lands are less suitable for growing crops
than more lowland areas. This, allied to environmental
degradation, may play a role in increasing the risk of
armed conflict," he said.
Biological losses were
expected by the report to be heavy.
The mountains of Europe, parts of California and the north-west
Andes, were among the most threatened, bio-diversity rich,
mountain areas in the world, it said, and should be made
conservation priorities.
Mankind could be expected
to deliberately destroy great areas
over the next 30 years. A quarter of all mountain areas could
be "highly impacted" by infrastructure development such
as
roads, mining, and power and pipelines by 2035.
The UN is anxious to
raise attention to the problems facing
mountain areas because they are inhabited by some of the most
vulnerable people, who can lose their livelihoods with even
the smallest shifts in climate or insensitive developments.
Meanwhile, many mountain
regions are losing people. Thousands
of villages in Europe are deserted most of the year; in other
areas like Nepal, people are drifting to the cities in search
of work.
"These losses
affect us all, said Mr Toepfer. "Mountains have
been a source of wonder and inspiration for human societies
and cultures since time immemorial. But some of these last
wild areas are fast disappearing in the face of agriculture,
infrastructure development, and other creeping impacts".
The report will be
presented to heads of state at the world's
first mountain summit at Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan next week.
At risk: a
way of life
