Impacts and Risks of Global Change - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 57

change adaptation technologies like organic farming, mixed cultures, and
bioengineering. Good examples are the Río Piedras Basin in Southern
Colombia (Borsdorf et al. 2011) or the livelihood studies in Northern
Colombia (Marchant and Borsdorf 2013).
Under the pressure of globalization specifi cally the large agglomerations
in mountain regions lose their individual shape and are transforming to
globalized cities, not only in architecture, but also in the social space. Gated
communities, increasing segregation, and fragmentation are indicators for
this development (Borsdorf and Coy 2010).
Risks
Risks of climate change
Without doubt mountains are much more prone to risks than most other
regions in the world (Stötter and Monreal 2010). At a fi rst glance there is an
increasing risk of dangerous feedbacks and abrupt, large-scale shifts in the
climate system. Images of fl ooded valley bottoms, destroyed houses, eroded
roads or cut-off villages may come into mind. These risks related to natural
hazard processes, e.g., rock fall, debris fl ows, avalanches or fl oods, have
been part of the specifi c human-environment system in mountains regions
ever since settlement and intensive utilization of land began. In this sense
they were perceived as part and parcel of the mountain environment (in the
sense of a base disposition), infrequently topped by extreme events with
the character of an existential threat (in the sense of a variable disposition).
By learning to cope with these challenges throughout centuries, mountain
societies have adapted to the specifi c natural hazard conditions of their
specifi c environments.
In addition to these locally or regionally controlled interrelationships,
nowadays global driving forces impact on human-environment systems in
general, i.e., (i) global climate change, (ii) globalization, and (iii) resources
scarcity. While the regional variations of climate change processes alter
natural process dynamics, globalization processes cause new demographic,
cultural, social and economic structures. As a consequence both base and
variable disposition are superimposed by a trend of new forcings thus
resulting in new dimensions of challenges to mountain societies never
experienced before.
This story is more than a tale of minor relevance in an anyhow extreme
environment. A fi fth of the terrestrial surface is classifi ed as mountains and
roughly 12% of the world population lives in mountain areas. Moreover,
these changing conditions affect nearly half of the humanity in the adjacent
medium- and lower-watershed areas as they depend strongly on mountain-