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Mountain resources: Forests, minerals, biodiversity, and
sustainable livelihoods
Logging generates employment and income-as well as inputs for production. It
can also disrupt local cultures and production patterns. Unless forest dwellers
control their own resources and gain the revenue from their exploitation,
logging may not raise the income of mountain people-and may even impoverish
them over the medium term (as happened in India and Indonesia), even in
high-income countries (West Virginia).27
It may provide short-term income at low wages for loggers, but once an area is
logged out, timber companies move on, leaving the local populace without
traditional sources of livelihood in the now-depleted forests. This often leads
to destructive cutting of the remaining wood for other uses, which is not
sustainable.
Minerals, like forests, are distributed unevenly among mountain areas and are
often extracted by enterprises (foreign or national) from outside the region.
The impacts of mining are more localized than for logging, but usually more
intense due to the potential for social clashes and possible environmental
problems. More recently, there has been progress in addressing sustainable
mining.
Biodiversity and amenity benefits are among the most widespread of mountain
values and among the most difficult to assign market prices. Although
individual species attract attention, most biodiversity and amenity benefits
stem from the integrated functioning of mountain environmental systems. These
ecosystems provide important sources of livelihood for mountain dwellers. A
steady livelihood can be earned from the sustainable use of mountain forests,
for example from tourism and recreational uses, or from combining biodiversity
preservation and commercial crop development (box 4.3).
Box 4.3
Balancing public and private goods: biodiversity and coffee production in
Chiapas
The El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve has remarkable biodiversity conservation
value, with relatively large tracts of still-intact cloud forest and a high
diversity of native animal and plant species, including many which only occur
in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas and Guatemala.* Inside the El Triunfo Reserve's
120,000 hectares of pristine forest are some of the poorest people in Mexico.
At 40 percent, the incidence of extreme poverty in Chiapas is more than twice
the national rate (17 percent) and more than six times the incidence in
Mexico's northern states (6 percent). Some 14,000 people in a buffer zone of
private land inside the reserve had been clearing forest to plant
mountain-grown coffee, cutting down some 17,000 hectares of forest in the last
20 years. Coffee producers were unaware that tree cover protects the coffee
plants and improves the quality of the coffee.
In July 1999 the Global Environment Facility (GEF) provided grant funding
($750,000) for a Habitat Enhancement Project. A local NGO was put in charge of
fostering community cooperatives and local leadership in 20 villages, helping
local leaders prepare natural resource and development plans. The NGO brought
together for the first time local government officials, communities, and NGOs
to coordinate activities, learn about shade-grown coffee, and improve access to
credit and technical assistance.
The El Triunfo farmers were among the first to test an emerging market for
environmentally friendly coffee. The organic shade-grown coffee and the
producer organization's skill in marketing the superior quality coffee allow
farmers to earn a premium of 40-100 percent over ordinary mountain-grown coffee
(and over what they were earning before). Investing in knowledge, local
leadership, and grass-roots cooperation gave poor farmers an incentive to
protect their natural resource base as one of their best assets.
Source: Pagiola
and Ruthenberg (2002)
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Integrated mountain systems have aesthetic and economic benefits of global
value. They reduce risks of landslides and protect biodiversity, which
preserves genomes for food crops and the development of new medicines. Mountain
forest areas can also be important for sequestering carbon dioxide. It is
difficult to translate these benefits and values into market prices and
transactions, but work is under way on a carbon trading system (one example is
the sequestration program in Costa Rica-see
box 8.5).
Mountains are involved in many ecological processes: water management,
biodiversity, weather influences, and cultural, recreational, and amenity
values. Human interventions can alter these relationships in ways that may harm
(or benefit) different populations. Just as on the arid grasslands, when
population and economic pressures are low and resources abundant, use of the
public good does not usually pose a sustainability problem. As pressures
increase, overuse and abuse may arise, usually requiring some type of
institution to manage the scarcity. Threats can result from degradation due to
open access exploitation, from insufficient protection of valuable assets, and
from imperfect pricing of the goods provided. Managing mountain environments
often requires more elaborate consideration of the systematic secondary effects
than is the case for lowland areas.
There are often competing demands on mountain resources for increasing resource
extraction or preserving in-place and downstream services. Like drylands,
mountains are not homogeneous. Each area requires a different strategy based on
its inherent potential, the mix of natural resource values, and the commercial
value of some of its renewable and nonrenewable products. All strategies need
to incorporate the land's potential and the voice, capabilities, and
aspirations of the people living there.
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