The greatest challenges are faced by mountain women who live in remote areas at higher altitudes. After introducing some of the resource management issues of mountain areas, the remainder of the presentation focuses on mountain women - who actually live in the mountains, as opposed to those living downstream who depend on the environmental services mountains provide. For these women, everything is harder the higher you go: the body needs more calories to live at higher altitudes, but the growing season for crops is shorter. Services, like health care and education, are in short supply or in many cases they simply do not exist; settlement fragmentation in mountainous areas makes it difficult and expensive to provide even the most basic social services. Similarly, terrain conditions make communications of all types problematic. Construction of roads and other linkages to markets is difficult, impairing access to markets, with resulting constraints to economic development and social integration.
