climate change
Mountains are an important source of water, energy and biological diversity. Furthermore, they are a source of such key resources as minerals, forest, agricultural products and recreation. As a major ecosystem representing the complex and interrelated ecology of our planet, mountain environments are essential to the survival of the global ecosystem."
Mountain ecosystems contain an integrated complex of natural resources that are closely linked in space and time. Those who inhabit the mountains generally depend directly on many of these resources for their livelihoods and tend to utilize and manage them through a combination of land use practices such as agriculture, forestry and livestock production. With these characteristics,...
'Land degradation' is widely recognised as a critical environmental problem in the mountains of Lesotho. Lesotho is renowned for its "prominent soil erosion. that stands out (in satellite imagery) in stark contrast to the surrounding well vegetated landscape of South Africa.... a stage only one above that of desert" The highland farmer and his livestock are commonly blamed for such spectacular...
Two ice cores from the col of Huascaran in the northcentral Andes of Peru contain a paleoclimatic history extending well into the Wisconsinan Glacial Stage and include evidence of the Younger Dryas cool phase. Glacial stage conditions at high elevations in the tropics appear as much as 8-12 degrees cooler, the atmosphere was 200 times dustier, and the Amazon Basin forest cover may have been 40...
Climatic knowledge of mountain regions is limited by paucity of observations and insufficient theoretical attention to processes within these regions. Areas where our theoretical understanding is incomplete include orographic precipitation, especially extreme events, pollutant transport and deposition, and effects of forest cover on evapo-transpiration and runoff.
Direct and indirect...
For several years, scientists have been saying that the world's climate is warming up. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) the year 1998 proved to be one of the hottest years on record (WMO 1998). If unchecked, global warming may have two affects that are of interest to us - changing of vegetation and the possible raising of sea levels and the inundation of coastal towns...
The Earth's ice cover is melting in more places and at higher rates than at any time since record keeping began. Reports from around the world compiled by the Worldwatch Institute show that global ice melting accelerated during the 1990s-which was also the warmest decade on record.
Scientists suspect that the enhanced melting is among the first observable signs of human-induced...
During the 1980s, a series of major changes to the Earth's environment, including increases in C02 levels and the hole in the ozone layer, were detected only because of the existence of long-term monitoring. The recognition of a lack of quantitative long-term information on the state of the environment came to the fore, and the need for national and international programmes to monitor...
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