Impacts and Risks of Global Change - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 62

the global circulation system and due to the specifi c state of development
vulnerability and resilience/coping capacities vary strongly from one to
another mountain region.
Since the 19th century mountain regions have become attractive
destinations for tourism and recreation. Today both play a key role in
mountain economies. International tourism has increased 25-fold in the
second half of the 20th century and mountain regions take an increasing
share of possible destinations (Beniston 2003). In fact with 336-370 million
overnight stays, i.e., 11% worldwide, the Alps are the number one tourist
destination in Europe (Bätzing 2003).
Urban metropolises—a risky habitat
The demographic concentration in huge urban agglomerations is a matter
of risk per se (Kraas 2003, Münchener Rück 2005). Political, social or
economic confl icts often arise from those human accumulations. Natural
hazards, scarcity of water, energy, pests, and other threats have catastrophic
dimensions. Emissions and immissions produced by industry, car traffi c
and household pollution have more victims than elsewhere. Megacities
in mountainous areas deserve the label of future 'risk hotspots' (Borsdorf
and Coy 2009).
This raises questions about the opportunities for and limits of control
and development of these megacities in terms of sustainability. In their
specifi c local differentiation, they will be strongly infl uenced by the tension
between global impacts on local development and the opportunities for
implementing location-specifi c responses. These questions will be dealt in
Chapter 4 of this topic.
The potential impact of environmental change can affect the
development of megacities directly and indirectly. Droughts, floods,
desertifi cation, soil degradation and the environmental and resource
confl icts that these disasters trigger are push factors which will continue to
cause people to leave their rural home regions in search of a better future
in the megacities. In scenarios which take into account future climate wars
megacities even serve as havens for environmental and confl ict refugees
(Borsdorf and Coy 2009).
To demonstrate the impact of climate change and natural processes to
large urban agglomerations we will take Andean cities as an example. They
are located in areas that are extremely sensitive to the emergence of natural
hazards (Sánchez 2010). Between 1950 and 2009, more than 650 disasters
hit the countries of the Andean region. These catastrophes had both natural
and socio-natural antecedents, with fl oods (38%) and earthquakes (20%)
the most frequent phenomena that directly or indirectly affected the main
metropolitan areas (Fig. 3.5).