Impacts and Risks of Global Change - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 50

cities during the 20th century. Among the 40 urban agglomerations with
more than fi ve million inhabitants with more than 392 million inhabitants
(Borsdorf and Coy 2009) 17 are located in mountainous environments,
among those Mexico City, Guatemala City, Bogotá, Lima, Santiago and
Rio de Janeiro are located in Latin America. Andean cities have received
an enormous demographic burden which has provoked a macrocephalic
effect in some countries, as in the case of Peru and Chile, where both Lima
and Santiago de Chile, are 9 resp. 6 times bigger than the next biggest cities
in terms of inhabitants ('primacy'). Apart from this huge mass of people
we have to bear in mind that the largest and most important cities of the
Andes represent more than two thirds of the productive capacity of their
respective countries and are at the same time closely related to other national
and international agglomerations.
It is evident, that the impact of climate change in such mountain
megacities affect more people than in less densely populated areas. Heavy
and long rainfalls cause catastrophic floods and in some cases mass
movements, heat waves warm the urban agglomerations more than open
land, droughts and wet years infl uence the water, energy and food supply.
Increasing water scarcity is one of the major problems in near future to
many megacities, even in mountainous areas, which are still function as
water-towers.
Long high air pressure periods lead in agglomerations located in basins
to the concentration of polluted air under a temperature inversion roof and
may have in consequence health problems for the population. The warmer
rivers are a source of pathogenic bacteria (Abraham 2011), the case of SARS
in Asia a few years ago has highlighted the specifi c role that megacities as
global hubs play in the spread of new diseases (Münchener Rück 2005).
Impacts of Globalization
Drivers of globalization
Whereas climate change effects have a long time scale, the impacts of
globalization are much faster and in many cases even more effective than
the natural processes. So the challenges for mountain regions cannot be
analyzed without considering the socio-economic and cultural changes
and the political framework. Mountains are regions where the manifold
interdependencies between economic, political, social and cultural
globalization processes and their effect are felt locally in many ways,
as in most cases because of their peripherical location, inaccessibility of
their inhabitants who were conserved in traditional culture, conserved
traditional land- use methods and were—with exception to the global
tourism and of mining—relatively separated from the global market. This