Sustainable Mountain Development - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 630

loped between power-generating companies and irrigation institutions, as in the Swiss
Alps (Crook 2001). An early example of the need to compensate mountain people for
providing downstream benefits was the 1916 law in Switzerland, which entitles com-
munities to substantial annual payments and quotas of free energy for granting the
rights to hydropower development on their land (Mauch and Reynard 2002). Develop-
ing countries are also introducing similar compensation mechanisms (McNeely 2009).
For instance, under Costa Rica's 1996 Forest Law, companies generating hydroelectri-
city from mountain water, or breweries depending on high water quality, pay mountain
landowners for the appropriate management of watersheds (Pagiola 2008).
At even larger scales, it is notable that 214 river basins, home to 40 percent of
the world's population and covering more than 50 percent of the global land area, are
shared by two or more countries (Wolf 2002). Many have assumed that this would lead
to increasing tension and conflict between nations, especially in water-scarce basins
such as those of the Euphrates, Ganges, Jordan, and Nile, which all originate in moun-
tains. Such prophecies have not proved accurate; if at all, water use conflicts occur
within rather than between states. Since the early 1950s, only 37 acute international
disputes have occurred, most between Israel and its neighbors, while over the same
period more than 150 treaties were signed worldwide (Delli Priscoli and Wolf 2009;
Weinthal and Vengosh 2011). However, the threat of conflicts over water both between
and within states cannot be ruled out as populations grow, demands for all uses of water
increase, and climate change leads to changes in both the timing and amount of precip-
itation and generally to increased evaporation. In this century, appropriate technologies
and new institutions will be needed at all scales, from villages to international regions,
to ensure that the benefits of mountain water are shared as fairly as possible among
both the guardians of the water towers and people living downstream.
FIGURE 12.17 Initially designed to combat deforestation by replacing fuelwood with electric power,
the small local hydropower plant in Salleri, Nepal, has been supplying energy to a steadily in-
creasing number of households—thus presenting a case of successful local innovation. (T. Kohler,
based on data from ITECO Engineering, Switzerland.)