Mountain areas - global priorities

Mountains cover 24% of the land surface of our planet. These very diverse regions, stretching from the Equator almost to both poles, are home to 12% of the global population. While many mountain people live in rural areas – often in remote, poor and disadvantaged communities – many others are urban, living in towns and cities in mountain valleys and on lower mountain slopes. Globally, 26% of humankind live in, adjacent, or very close to mountain areas: many in major cities – including Mexico City, Tokyo, and Quito – and also in towns and cities on all the inhabited continents.

Thus, well over a billion people depend on adjacent mountains for goods and services including water, food, forest products, and recreation. They, and further billions, also benefit from other mountains in other ways, including the provision of energy and minerals; their roles as centres of biodiversity, tourism, and religious significance; and clear evidence of climate change.


Mountains in the international agenda

The global importance of mountains has been increasingly recognised in global fora in recent years. In 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, included Chapter 13 – Managing Fragile Ecosystems: Sustainable Mountain Development – in Agenda 21, its plan for action. In 1995, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) identified mountain ecosystems as the subject of one of its ten operational programmes. By 2002, GEF had committed over $620 million and leveraged about $1.4 billion of additional funding for over 100 projects in 64 countries.

In 1998, in a resolution sponsored by 130 countries, the UN General Assembly proclaimed that 2002 would be the International Year of Mountains (IYM). A total of 78 countries created national committees for the IYM. During the IYM, a Mountain Partnership was established at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, which devoted paragraph 42
of its Plan of Implementation to mountains. At the end of the year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution appealing to UN organisations, governments, international financial institutions, NGOs, and academic, private sector and other stakeholders to further strengthen their involvement in mountain issues. In 2004, the seventh Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted a wide-ranging programme of work on mountain biological diversity.


WSSD Mountain Partnership

In December 2002 IUCN signed up to the International Partnership for Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions, that was officially launched on 2 September at the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa.


Contact
Please contact for more information Martin Price, martin.priceperth.uhi.ac.uk.