With their ever-changing weather, ravaging winds and freezing temperatures, mountains provide very different environments and unique wildlife that's adapted to live life on the craggy slopes, barren snow-caps or alpine meadows. In many places, people depend on mountains for water — either coming from melting snow or ice or from mountain springs feeding rivers - but surviving the often the harsh climate of mountains can be tough and it can be hard to grow enough food.
Despite their formidable and awe inspiring physicality, these are some of the most fragile habitats on the planet. Harsh climates, thin soils and steep gradient make it so very hard for plants and animals to live here. Relatively small changes or unexpected events such as unusually heavy rains, earth tremors, or over exploitation of land, can give rise to major physical events such as land slides and flash floods, bringing havoc to people, biodiversity and the mountain environment itself.
As the water towers of our world, mountains store and deliver water to the rivers on which all our lives depend. But their environments are fragile and can be easily damaged by natural and particularly human impacts.
We work with the people who live there, to protect and conserve the vital ecological services that mountains provide our planet. This water is also vital in the production of hydropower. Some countries rely almost exclusively on mountain regions for hydropower generation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Top COP26 stories: China and the US reach emissions deal; aviation sector seeks sustainable jet fuels; call for global agreement on sustainability reporting standards. As COP26 continues in Glasgow, an atmospheric scientist explores the key driving forces behind climate change and the impact it's having on the planet.
I accept. Take action on UpLink. Forum in focus. But in order for farming and herding people to dwell in the mountains with any economic security, the population must remain low, to avoid using up all of the sparse resources.
Because of the difficulties mountains put in the way of making a living at agriculture, mountain regions usually cannot support a prosperous agricultural tax base. People of mountain cultures, therefore, are used to being left alone by governments. These peoples' independent outlook is interchangeable around the world, whether they are Swiss, Papuan, Appalachian, or Jamaican Maroon.
Language and customs from hundreds or thousands of years ago survive in remote mountains, preserved by the same geography that cut them off in the first place.
Unlike farmers, people of the world's industrial civilization can find in the mountains a great bounty of the resources they cannot live without. Geologic formations of economically valuable minerals , called ore bodies, are left behind by the processes that make mountains. Mountain-building rearranges the formations that hold metal ores, coal , gemstones, asbestos , and other substances.
These ore bodies come to rest near enough to the surface to be mined at a profit. Although many mining districts have been "mined out," this only means that the minerals that could be mined for a profit have been removed. The world's mountain ranges still contain vast amounts of economic minerals, out of sight under kilometers of rock. It is just too difficult to cross over to other lands. Mountains and people It has been estimated that a tenth of the world's population - about half a billion people - lives in mountain areas.
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