MOUNTAINS MATTER

Mountains are vital for all life on earth. Today we celebrate the official International Mountain Day. International Mountain Day 2018 is an occasion to create a social movement that might bring mountain issues into the spotlight and on the tables of politicians. The vitality of the mountains are important for everyone who lives on our planet. Mountains are under a major threat from climate change, land degradation and over exploitation. I’ve seen the glacier on Kilimanjaro, and the glacier is predicted to be gone by 2033. Let’s have a look on why mountains are so vital for us.

Mountains are early indicators of climate change. As global climate continues to warm, some of the world’s hungriest and poorest people, face a greater struggles to survive. These people are often mountain people. The mountain people have a great wealth of knowledge and strategies that’s been accumulated over generations. This knowledge will come handy due to the rising temperatures that equals glaciers that are melting at unprecedented rates. This ends up affecting freshwater supplies downstream for millions of people.

Across our world people live in a large variety of locations and in different climates. Did you know that almost one billion people live in mountain areas? Another fact to know is that over half the human population depends on mountains for water, food and clean energy. In other words, the mountains are vital for humans. Mountains are the world’s “water towers”. They provide freshwater, as much as between 60 – 80 precent of all freshwater resources for our planet. The mountains provides food as the mountains are important homes to many of the foods that comes to our table, such as rice, potatoes, corn and tomatoes to name a few.

The mountains matter for tourism due to that these areas of important cultural diversity, knowledge and heritage. Across our world people people travel to get this knowledge and trying to understand how people live in different climates. Considering the role our mountains play we have to take care of them. The mountains matter and plays a huge role in providing wealth for almost one billion people. Mountains plays a key role in several ecosystems. They provide goods and services to our planet. We need to step up and raise attention to mountains, #MountainsMatter.