Mountain Laws and Peoples: Moving Towards Sustainable Development and Recognition of Community-Based Property Rights.

Mountain peoples, many with thousands of years of experience living and working in their rugged environments, are overlooked stewards of fragile landscapes that support over ten percent of the Earth's population, and protect the watersheds that ensure freshwater for more than half of humanity. The high variability of mountain ecosystems makes them home to irreplaceable global treasures of biological diversity -- a diversity that is protected by mountain communities whose traditional lifestyles depend on intimate knowledge and sustainable use of their natural environment.

Especially in developing countries, however, there is a marked "vertical gradient of poverty" in mountains, that makes mountains home to some of the poorest people in the world. Their poverty is increasing in most places, as development investments either ignore or exploit them. Mountain tourism now accounts for almost one-fifth of global tourism revenues, or about US $70-90 billion annually; yet mountain communities share little of the profits. Nor do mountain communities normally participate in decisions to grant timber licenses to log the remaining 25% of the world's forests that grow in upland areas -- forests on which mountain communities often depend for their very survival. They have minimal access to legal mechanisms for gaining recognition of their community-based property rights, or to education, health care, markets, and especially, decision-making power. Yet few technologies, policies, or laws exist to promote sustainable development for mountain peoples, or to protect the natural resources on which their future -- and all of ours -- depends.

In a few places, nevertheless, there are hopeful signs. Downstream communities are learning that investing in watershed protection provides direct economic benefits, as well as ensuring environmental services such as clean water. Sustainable revenues from ecotourism depend on participation of mountain peoples in continued conservation. Such impacts, documented in a previous Mountain Forum report, Investing in Mountains, have led to the development of special laws and policies designed to safeguard mountain environments and cultures. It is in this context that this ambitious report was undertaken. Through a unique partnership of the Mountain Forum, The Mountain Institute and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), we have undertaken a first-ever exploration of the reality -- and the potential -- of  law and policy to address the special and urgent issues facing mountain peoples and ecosystems. Using the Mountain Forum's 1997 electronic conference on "Mountain Policy and Law" as a starting point, the report systematically identifies and analyzes laws and policies that exist in countries and regions throughout the world. The resulting report on Mountain Laws and Peoples: Moving Towards Sustainable Development and Recognition of Community-based Property Rights is the only compilation on this subject. Its recommendations for action at international, national, and local levels are expected to be a major contribution to policy makers and pragmatists alike.