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Mapping vulnerability in mountains











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    Project
    Promoting Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions - GCP/GLO/204/MUL 2020
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    Many of the world’s poorest and most food insecure people live in mountain regions, which are some of the most fragile ecosystems on earth. A sustainable and integrated economy needs to be developed in mountain areas, which can promote and foster the well-being of local communities, granting access to a decent quality of life, reducing hunger, poverty and outmigration. However, current levels of cooperation and funding for development and conservation activities in mountains are inadequate. Against this background, the project supported the Mountain Partnership Secretariat (MPS), whose central coordinating unit is hosted at FAO, to establish an inclusive, multistakeholder platform for initiatives related to sustainable mountain development, and provide a more integrated, cohesive and harmonized mechanism, in order to stimulate stronger engagement and support from concerned member countries and mobilize additional resources.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Vulnerability of mountain peoples to food insecurity
    Updated data and analysis of drivers
    2020
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    This study, the third of its type published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), adds further evidence that in mountain regions of developing countries, food insecurity, social isolation, environmental degradation, exposure to the risk of disasters and to the impacts of climate change, and limited access to basic services, especially in rural areas, are still prevalent and, under some circumstances, increasing. It also shows the technical challenges for producing more comprehensive and representative assessments based on scientific data, and providing a deeper understanding of the underlying factors of vulnerability of mountain people. Mountains cover 39 million km2, or 27 percent, of the world’s land surface. In 2017, the global mountain population reached nearly 1.1 billion, which is 15 percent of the world’s population, with an increase of 89 million people since 2012. The increase added almost entirely (86 million people) to the mountain population in developing countries, which reached one billion people in 2017. The population has increased in all the regions of the developing world. Only the areas at the highest mountain altitudes (above 3 500 m) continued to experience a depopulation trend in the last 17 years, while at all other elevations population increased. In all African subregions, in South America and in Central and Western Asia, the population density is higher in the mountains than in the lowlands. In developing countries, 648 million people (65 percent of the total mountain population) live in rural areas. Half of them – 346 million – were estimated to be vulnerable to food insecurity in 2017. In other words, one in two rural mountain dwellers in developing countries live in areas where the daily availability of calories and protein was estimated to be below the minimum threshold needed for a healthy life. In the five years from 2012 to 2017, the number of vulnerable people increased in the mountains of developing countries, approximately at the same pace as the total mountain population. Although the proportion of vulnerable people to the total mountain population did not change, the absolute number of vulnerable people increased globally by 40 million, representing an increment of 12.5 percent from 2012 to 2017.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    International workshop and regional expert consultation on mountain agriculture development and food security and nutrition governance 2019
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    Mountain agricultures face multidimensional challenges of biophysical-technical, socio-economic, policy and institutional dimensions, given its vulnerability, inaccessibility and marginality. Typical farming concerns throughout the region include: encroachment of monocultures in response to demands from national, regional, and global markets; overexploitation of land resources due to population pressure and lack of economic alternatives; outmigration, land abandonment and decay of key farm infrastructure such as terraces in other regions, with as yet unknown effects on provision of environmental goods and services. However, mountains are hotspots of global biodiversity including agro-biodiversity. In addition, mountain hosts good condition for sustainable agriculture development because industrialized large-scale production is often not possible due to topography. Moreover, owing to remoteness and difficult access, the use of external inputs such as fossil fuels, mineral fertilizers, and pesticides is typically lower or less widespread than in lowland farming. The workshop was organized by FAO and the University of International Relations in collaboration with the FAO Special Ambassador of the International Year of Pulses 2016, the Mountain Partnership, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICIMOD and the University of Western Australia. The participants included experts, national focal point on zero hunger, government officials, academics and research partners.

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