The EU-funded GLOCHAMORE ("Global Change and Mountain Regions") project is predicated on the notion that scientists can contribute to the capacity of mountain communities, managers/coordinators of mountain biosphere reserves (MBRs), and the larger societies that surround them to anticipate the impacts of global environmental change, and respond in ways that maintain or enhance economic, ecological and social capital.
To address global environmental change and its consequences, the GLOCHAMORE project aims at:
- developing an integrative research strategy for detecting signals of global environmental change in mountain environments,
- defining the impacts of these changes on mountain regions as well as lowland areas dependent on mountain resources, and
- facilitating the development of sustainable resource management regimes for mountain regions.
Following the kick-off meeting of the project (held in Entlebuch, Switzerland, in November 2003), the details of the research strategy are being formulated through a series of product-oriented workshops dedicated to:
- Long-term Monitoring (Vienna, Austria, May 2004),
- Projections of Global Change Impacts through Modeling (Aquila, Italy, Dec 2004),
- Process Studies (Samedan, Switzerland, July 2005), and
- Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management (the workshop this report addresses).
The concepts developed in these Thematic Workshops will be revisited, refined and synthesized during a final Open Science Conference on Global Change in Mountain Regions, to be held in October 2005 in Perth, Scotland, UK.
As a result of global environmental change, the managers of MBRs around the world are increasingly confronted with higher frequencies of extreme events, such as drought, fire, flash floods, glacier lake outbursts, landslides, rockfalls, and avalanches - which all call for adjusted management plans. The alteration of management plans, however, requires a sound scientific knowledge base providing strong arguments to decision-makers and policy people. This fourth workshop on Sustainable Resource Management deals with the interface between scientific knowledge and environmental governance.
