UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY AND MOUNTAIN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
UNU has been involved with mountains almost since its establishment more than a quarter century ago. In 1977 Professor Walther Manshard accepted the position of UNU Vice Rector with responsibility to organize a programme on the "Use and Management of Natural Resources". This was to include applied research and training with initial emphasis on developing countries in the humid tropics and subtropics. Four components were included: agro-forestry systems; rural energy systems; water-land interactive systems; and highland-lowland interactive systems. The programme was subsequently enlarged to embrace arid and semi-arid lands, encompassing additional administrative components. A project co-ordinator, usually from an established university, was appointed to take charge of each unit. Initially, every six months the project coordinators were invited to the UNU Centre in Tokyo for planning purposes.
Those involved in the project on Highland-Lowland Interactive Systems collaborated closely with those in Agro-forestry Systems. The first exploratory undertaking involved the two project co-ordinators, Professor Gerardo Budowski (CATIE, Costa Rica) and Professor Jack D. Ives (University of Colorado, U.S.A.), who travelled to Northern Thailand in April 1978 as guests of Chiang Mai University to evaluate the university's on-going work at the Huai Thung Choa research centre in the northwestern hills. Recommendations to adapt the Huai Thung Choa project into a combined UNU/Chiang Mai University study were accepted by the UNU Vice Rector and in the process Chiang Mai University became an affiliate institution of UNU. Likewise, CATIE and the University of Colorado became affiliate UNU institutions and received some of the earliest of the UNU post-doctoral fellows for training and integration into the on-going field research projects.
During the same year, Ives made a reconnaissance into sections of the Indian and Nepal Himalaya. This resulted in the selection of Nepal for a full-scale reconnaissance in 1979 with the identification of Kakani (Middle Mountains) and Khumbu (High Himal) as field test areas for what originally was to be a study of mountain hazards and their possible abatement. The move into the Himalaya coincided with Professor Bruno Messerli, University of Bern, Switzerland, becoming co-coordinator of the Highland-Lowland Interactive Systems project and his home institution an affiliate of UNU. The Ives-Messerli partnership continued until 2000 when Professor Hans Hurni, also of the University of Bern, accepted the leadership position. He had been involved in some of the early work in Northern Thailand and, with Messerli, saw the expansion of UNU's mountain project into Ethiopia and the Highlands of East Africa.
The mountain project subsequently extended into Yunnan, China, the Andes, Tajikistan, and Madagascar. Field excursions and conferences were also held in Papua-New Guinea, Tibet, the Tien Shan and western Szechwan, China, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Switzerland, Japan, and the United States. The project had clearly become global in nature and a large number of institutional linkages evolved. The theoretical basis was closely linked with UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme – Project 6 (impact of human activities on mountain ecosystems) and the Commission on Mountain Geoecology of the International Geographical Union. It facilitated the establishment of the International Mountain Society in 1980 and the quarterly journal Mountain Research and Development the following year. Thus, applied and fundamental research, the training of young scholars, and the wide dissemination of the results of the research were the hallmarks of the project. To further strengthen institutional affiliations, strong support was given to the formation of the African Mountain Association and the Andean Mountain Association. Moreover, elements of the research had repercussions that were far more significant than could have been anticipated at the time. This began when early results of the research in Nepal challenged and eventually disproved the influential belief in catastrophic Himalayan environmental degradation.
Throughout most of the final thirty years of the last century the major multi-lateral, bilateral, and national aid and development agencies centred much of their investment in the Himalaya on the pursuit of policies based on an unsound assumption. This presumed that the Himalaya were facing an environmental crisis driven by massive deforestation of the mountain slopes by the rapidly expanding subsistence agricultural populations who depended upon forest products. This was causally linked with soil erosion and landsliding and increasingly severe flooding in Gangetic India and Bangladesh. An international conference, held at Mohonk Mountain House, New York State, in 1986 and sponsored by UNU, brought this dominating paradigm under critical scrutiny. It was found to be basically unsound; the supporting arguments were published in book form in The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation (Ives and Messerli, 1989).
This process of fundamental research followed by open discussion exemplified the unique opportunity that academic status provides for UNU. Unlike the more policy-oriented United Nations agencies, it is better able to tackle politically sensitive issues. The Himalayan controversy was one of several that became the focus of the mountain project. It was the critical one, however, that provided much of the initiative leading to the inclusion of Chapter 13 (Managing fragile environments – sustainable mountain development) into Agenda 21 during the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. Furthermore, this impetus continued through to the special General Assembly of the UN (1997 – Rio-Plus-Five) and helped facilitate the recognition of 2002 as the International Year of Mountains.
With the declaration of the IYM, the UNU mountain project was evaluated and restructured so that it could more effectively contribute to the challenges of 2002 and beyond. The project has evolved from "Highland-Lowland Interactive Systems", to "Mountain Ecology and Sustainable Development", to its current designation: Global Mountain Partnership Programme (GMPP). The framework for the new departure was formulated in Tokyo in July 2000 by representatives of UNU, the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, and several Japanese mountain-related groups, especially, Hokkaido University. UNU-GMPP will further increase UNU's involvement in mountains with the primary goals of promoting sustainable development of mountain systems worldwide and of enhancing understanding of the increasingly serious problems that challenge mountain communities and environments today. There will be an initial concentration on "Sustainable Use and Development of Natural Resources in the High Pamir Mountains of Central Asia".