Monitoring from mountains. (Recent Trends).

A United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiative will use its unique network of biosphere reserves to monitor global climate change. Home to some 500 million people, mountain areas are also the source of water for more than half of the world's population. "Mountain biosphere reserves are ideal natural research centres for studying global change and monitoring its effects on the socio-economic conditions of mountain people", said UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura.

Mountains are extremely sensitive to global change. One dramatic sign is that glaciers on most mountains are melting. The snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in the United Republic of Tanzania has since 1912 lost some 82 per cent of its permafrost, a third of this in the past two decades. Glaciers in mountain ranges around the world, from the Alps to the Andes and the Urals to the Rockies, tell a similar tale.

The new project is being carried out in partnership with the scientific community through a number of existing programmes, including the Mountain Research Initiative based in Berne, Switzerland, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. With these partners, UNESCO is selecting biosphere reserve sites from each of the major mountainous regions as the focus for this new global climate change monitoring programme.