The Hindu Kush-Himalayas

The 3,500 km mountain range of the HKH that stretches from Afghanistan in the west to Mynamar in the east is home to more than 120 million people. Their environments and livelihoods are threatened by an increasing imbalance between population and available productive land. In many places the carrying capacity of the land has now been exceeded, leading to an ever-increasing demand for new agricultural and forest land and land-based products. Consequently, the forested upper slopes of these young mountains are being cleared for cultivation, grazing, fodder, fuelwood, and timber. Removal of vegetation on steep slopes in conjunction with intense monsoon rainfall is triggering massive erosion and landslides, with resulting soil impoverishment and soil losses and a deteriorating biophysical environment. This is leading to increasing poverty in mountain communities because the natural resource bases of forest, soil, water, plant, and animal life, on which they depend for their continued survival, are being lost at an alarming rate. Measures to control this deterioration are required before the ecological balance is irreversibly damaged.

Neglect of mountain areas in the past by policy-makers has resulted in a general lack of understanding of the natural and human processes affecting these mountains. The few development interventions that were designed were often of a sectoral nature that addressed the symptoms more than the causes of the problem and largely ignored the opportunities for development that the mountains of the HKH provide. What is needed now is an integrated approach to sustainable development that reconciles the economic needs and aspirations of the people with the requirements for maintaining biological productivity. Many of the problems that the HKH Region is facing are not uncommon in other developing conntries also, others are specific to the mountains and so are the opportunities.