• N E W S R E L E A S E •

For release Sunday January 27, 2002

North America contact: Terry Collins, 416-538-8712; 416-878-8712 (mobile)

Japan contact: Sumiko Sudo, 81-3-3499-2811

UNU senior advisor and mountain expert Dr. Jack Ives is available for interviews. Please call 416-538-8712 or 703-820-2244 to schedule a time. High-resolution photographs are available for download and media use at http://www.unu.edu/mountains2002/hrphotos.html

Mountain Ecosystems Endangered

War, exploitation and pollution threaten
freshwater source for half of world's population

The degradation of mountain ecosystems – home to 600 million people and the source of water for more than half the world's population – threatens to seriously worsen global environmental problems including floods, landslides and famine, according to an analysis by United Nations University.

Climate change, pollution, armed conflict, population growth, deforestation and exploitative agricultural, mining and tourism practices are among a growing list of problems confronting the "water towers of the world," prompting warnings that catastrophic flooding, landslides, avalanches, fires and famines will become more frequent and that many unique animals and plants will disappear.

While several of the world’s mountain areas are in relatively good ecological shape, many face accelerating environmental and cultural decline brought on in part by government and multilateral agency policies too often founded on inadequate research.

At the start of the U.N. International Year of Mountains 2002, the European Alps and the Himalaya-Karakorum-Hindu Kush chain (stretching from the borders of Myanmar and China across northern India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan) were deemed the most threatened mountain ranges in the developed and developing worlds respectively (see appendix).

Hans van Ginkel, Rector of UNU, says the International Year of Mountains is an opportunity and invitation to the scientific community to foster better, more effective aid and development policies by improving the world’s understanding of environmental and other problems facing mountain regions.

"Mountain ecosystems are essential to the well-being of the global environment. Yet there is a serious problem of widespread over-simplification of mountain-related issues and a tendency to try to solve problems that are not properly defined," says Dr. van Ginkel. "At best, this means wasted effort and funds. At worst, it can cause even more damage to these fragile ecosystems."

At U.N. House in Tokyo, UNU activities to mark the International Year of Mountains 2002 include a public forum Jan. 31, an international symposium on Mountain Ecosystems February 1, and a photography exhibition (also online at http://www.unu.edu/mountains2002/photoexhibit).

Half world’s people depend on healthy mountain ecosystems

Mountains and highlands are found on every continent, cover about a quarter of the Earth's land surface and are home to 10% of the world's people. Another 40% live in adjacent medium and lower watershed areas; thus more than half the global population is directly or indirectly dependent on mountain resources and services, the foremost being water for drinking and home use, irrigation, hydro power, industry and transportation.

Each region features a complex array of strengths and problems, making it impossible to generalize about global approaches to mountain-related issues. "It is possible to generalize, however, about the absolute lack of information needed for effective policy formulation," according to Dr. Jack Ives, senior advisor to UNU and a mountain ecology expert.

"What data policy makers do rely on often relates to mountain ranges in the developed world, inappropriately applied to developing countries. Notions based on scant scientific data are accepted as truths. For example, while there are serious problems in the Himalaya, massive deforestation has not occurred across the entire mountain system. Such misinformed assumptions have led to simplistic, and often counter-productive, remedies.”

In addition to gathering and sharing more and better data and information worldwide, there is an urgent need to strengthen capacity in developing country mountain areas in such studies as meteorology, hydrology, ecology and soil sciences, says Dr. Ives, a professor at Canada's Carleton University.

“These must be firmly linked as well to the human sciences – anthropology, social science and human geography,” he added.

“The management of mountain regions and watersheds in a way that embraces and integrates many sciences is a key to success. Another is the promotion of alternative livelihood opportunities for mountain people in developing countries, to alleviate the poverty at the root of so many of their health and environmental problems.”

War, natural disasters take heavy toll in mountain regions

War and natural disasters have long plagued mountain regions. Researchers have determined natural disasters in mountain regions worldwide were responsible for almost 1.6 million lives lost between 1900 to 1988, the foremost causes being floods and earthquakes.

Other figures show that combat in mountain regions – some 105 wars and conflicts between 1945 and 1995 – resulted in 11.1 million casualties, including 7.8 million civilians.

Dr. Ives said that while natural disasters are usually well reported, the world community has tended to ignore mountain warfare in all its forms, “including the atrocious treatment of mountain minorities.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that almost all of the world's conflicts today – 23 of 27 wars – are being fought in mountainous regions.

Appendix

Developed world mountain regions under greatest stress:

European Alps

Two-season tourism has grown exponentially in the Alps since the 1950s, severely compromising traditional alpine culture and beauty. Once pristine mountain valleys are now a litter of cable cars, ski lifts, tourist facilities and car parks.

In recent years, warmer than usual weather has reduced the length of the ski season at lower elevations. Yet despite the decline in snow conditions, millions of tourist vehicles, added to already heavy commercial traffic, continue to cause dangerous air pollution levels in many alpine valleys.

Current development trends show population shifting from the small farming communities in the Alpine zone (above 1,000 metres) to a handful of economic centers. Many experts believe that if this migration continues it will lead to a variety of problems throughout the Alps.

“The depopulation of small mountain communes, contrary to popular belief, leads to accelerated soil erosion and landslides because the traditional farming patterns are frequently the best precautions against landscape degradation,” says Dr. Ives.

The Alps supply the flow to major European rivers including the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, and the Po.

“The importance of the Alps, both in terms of a secure supply of high quality water and hydroelectricity cannot be over-stated,” says Dr. Ives. “The threat of water pollution stemming from developments of all kinds -- including mass tourism -- is growing in the Alps.”

Dr. Ives says encouraging signs that European governments are accelerating work to address mountain-related problems include the signature of an Alpine Convention by countries from France to Slovenia, and the December 2001 designation of the Aletsch region of the Swiss Alps as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Aletsch includes the famous peaks of Jungfrau, Eiger, Bietschhorn, Wetterhorn, and the Aletsch forest. Its World Heritage Site designation should help protect the region from further inappropriate and damaging development, Dr. Ives added.

Rockies and Coast Ranges of Western North America

The popularity of skiing and other recreation is placing unsustainable pressures on many areas. Throughout western Canada and the U.S., conflicts are emerging over the competing demands of recreationalists, environmentalists, logging and mining industries.

As well, with the growth of telecommuting in North American society over the last 10-15 years, ever larger numbers of people are building homes in prime mountain land and maintaining their business interests long-distance. This is creating management problems ranging from parks fire protection issues to the preservation of wildlife habitat.

Unlike previous booms in mining, cattle, or energy, today’s development growth in the North American Rockies is driven by new economies – services, recreation and information. The result is sprawling land-use conversion, mostly from agriculture to residential, even in the most rural areas, leading to fragmented land ownership, sharper contrasts in land-use at public/private boundaries, and natural habitat loss.

Such problems are becoming better recognized, Dr. Ives said. In Canada, for example, a recent government report concluded Banff National Park (Canada’s first and the crown jewel of the national park system) is in serious danger of being over developed.

Other problems of particular concern in the North American Rockies include climate change and industrial pollution. In Canada, a series of warm winters has exacerbated a pine beetle infestation that now threatens more than half a million hectares of forest in British Columbia. And in the U.S., pollution from mining operations has produced serious problems in specific areas. The Colorado Rockies are badly affected by toxic mine tailings, for example.

Water management issues in the Rockies promise to loom large in years ahead. A preview has been provided by the controversy over the diversion of west-slope water in Colorado to feed the rapidly expanding “urban corridor” from Colorado Springs through Denver to Fort Collins.

Western Carpathians / Tatra Mountains (Slovak Republic / Poland)

The Tatra Mountains cover a relatively small area surrounded by highly developed industrialized regions, especially in Poland to the northwest. Like the Alps, they are becoming impacted by rapidly growing two-season mass tourism. As well, trees are heavily damaged by air pollution, especially acid rain, from neighboring industrial centers, a problem exacerbated by periodic drought and subsequent insect infestations.

Snowy Mountains, Australia

More than 250 species of plants are threatened by potential changes in the duration and amount of snowfall caused by a series of unusually warm winters. Studies have found sub-alpine trees growing at altitudes 40 metres higher than 25 years ago.

Great Smoky Mountains, U.S.

This national park is severely polluted, with the highest nitrate deposition of any monitored site in North America. During 1998, the park's worst recorded year for ground-level ozone, studies found damage to 30 plant species in the area. Upper elevations are saturated with acid deposition.

Developing world mountain regions under greatest stress:

Himalaya-Karakorum-Hindu Kush

This great series of ranges, extending from the borders of Myanmar and China across northern India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is beset by a long list of problems.

“The most severe examples of environmental and socioeconomic degradation, of course – now near total disaster – are the HinduKush in Afghanistan, the Karakorum and western Himalaya (embracing Pakistan’s Northern Areas), and the disputed territory of Kashmir,” Dr. Ives says.

“Military and repressive government actions together overwhelm the already serious problems of poverty, drought, deforestation, out-migration, and unfair treatment of mountain minority peoples.”

In many places elsewhere through the Himalaya problems are brought on in part by quickening deforestation due to the growth of tourism and of forest-based industries (furniture, sporting goods and newsprint, for example). In the last few decades, an intricate network of roads has been built into the mountains, providing access to many previously remote areas.

Among other issues in the Himalaya causing environmental problems: overgrazing, accidental forest fires and rock quarrying.

While environmental problems in several parts of the Himalaya are serious and in some places severe, Dr. Ives says their downstream impacts are “grossly over-simplified and exaggerated” by some governments as a way to divert attention away from far more damaging government-sponsored policies and practices.

“Logging, both illegal and government sponsored, dam construction in areas of high seismic activity and inappropriate reforestation programs are responsible for far more damage than that caused by so-called ‘ignorant’ subsistent mountain farmers,” Dr. Ives says. “The farmers are political scapegoats for downstream siltation and flooding along the Ganges River in India and Bangladesh, for example, portrayed as ‘a relatively small number of irresponsible mountain farmers affecting the lives of several hundred million downstream dwellers on the great river plains’. This is simply not true.”

Pamir, Tajikistan

The mountain Tajiks, driven out by the Soviet army in the 1940s, started returning in the late 1980s. The civil war that later followed in Tajikistan resulted in widespread devastation and poverty.

Hengduan Mountains, southwest China – Yunnan

In an attempt to prevent flooding and silt buildup downstream in the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, China's central government banned all logging in the headwaters of the great streams. This approach is widely regarded as scientifically unsound and another economic burden on already impoverished mountain communities. Efforts to compensate by pushing for rapid development of mass tourism threaten to damage the country's great variety of mountain cultures.

Recent positive developments include the 1996 World Heritage Site designation of Lijiang Town – ancient capital of the Naxi minority nation and the Yunnan Great Rivers Project: a government-NGO collaboration to protect a spectacular area bigger than Pennsylvania containing river gorges (Salween, Mekong, Yangtse) that cut through ice-capped mountains whose lower slopes and valleys are among the world’s most biologically diverse.

Sierra Chincua, Mexico

Since the early 1970s, logging and agricultural expansion have destroyed 44 per cent of the forest in this reserve in central Mexico, winter home of the monarch butterfly. At that rate, the entire forest will be gone within 50 years.

Amber Mountains, Madagascar

Some 80 per cent of Madagascar's forest has been lost to agricultural expansion, mining and charcoal production. The remaining 14 million hectares are disappearing at a rate of between 150,000 and 200,000 hectares a year.

Worldwide, deforestation of the tropical rain forests is highly visible in the global media but the highest rate of deforestation occurs in mountain cloud forests – 1.1 percent per year, according to the FAO. Rates of clearing are particularly high in Central America, East and Central Africa, Southeast Asia and the Andes.

* * * * *

Maps of the world’s mountain ranges are online at:

http://www.unep-wcmc.org/habitats/mountains/index.html

UNU will mark the start of the U.N. International Year of Mountains 2002 with three events at its Tokyo headquarters: a public forum, Mountains: Environment and Human Activities, (Jan. 31); an international symposium on Conservation of Mountain Ecosystems (Feb. 1); and a photography exhibit, Mountain Prospects – Images for the International Year of Mountains, running January through March at U.N. House in Tokyo and online at http://www.unu.edu/mountains2002/photoexhibit

A major summit, co-chaired by the Government of Kygyzstan and FAO, will take place October 29 - November 1 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Established by the U.N. General Assembly in 1973, UNU is an international community of scholars engaged in research, advanced training and the dissemination of knowledge related to pressing global problems. Activities focus mainly on peace and conflict resolution, sustainable development and the use of science and technology to advance human welfare. The University operates a worldwide network of research and post-graduate training centres, with headquarters in Tokyo.