Mountain people around the world are in danger of losing their cultures and being caught by conflict and environmental degradation, according to a United Nations report.
As global warming and deforestation accelerated, and technology made wild places accessible, environmental and social pressures on the remotest regions were escalating, said the authors from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
They found that many mountainous regions — officially inhabited by one in five of the population, according to the UN — were barely recognisable 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 globalisation. It was adversely affecting soils, regional climates and water supplies for lowland areas. If trends continued, the fabled snows of Kilimanjaro in east Africa would have all melted within 30 years.
Greenland’s icy mountains were expected to be hardest hit by global warming. The authors expected 98% of its mountain areas to experience severe climate change by 2055.
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”.
Adrian Newton, lead author of the report, 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.
The report expected biological losses 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.
The report is to be presented to heads of state at the world’s first mountain summit at Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan this week. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002