Mountains as the water towers of the world: A call for action on the sustainable development goals (SDGs)

 

Mountains cover 25 percent of the world’s land surface, and directly support 12 percent of the world’s population living within mountain regions. Sustainable mountain development (SMD) should be a global priority, given the multitude of ecosystem goods and services that mountain provide, not just to mountain peoples but to the millions living downstream.

 

Through their watershed function, mountains supply more than half of humanity with water for drinking, irrigation, industry, food and energy production. However, water and other mountain ecosystem services are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Human activities such as urbanization and infrastructure development further aggravate environmental degradation which affects the quantity and quality of water resources. The degradation of mountain ecosystem services has severe consequences for livelihoods and environments of downstream regions.

 

Following the call for SMD in Chapter 13 of Agenda 21, the action plan endorsed by the ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992, and the recent Rio+20 outcome document, “The Future We Want”, mountains need to be covered by the SDGs, especially the goals where mountains play a crucial role for global sustainable development. These include the focus areas related to water and sanitation, poverty eradication, food security, energy, ecosystems and biodiversity as well as climate change.