Biodiversity conservation in the Kangchenjunga landscape

The area surrounding Mount Kangchenjunga in the eastern Himalayas is spread across four countries: Nepal, India, Bhutan, and China. It includes many protected areas—of particular interest to mountain overs—that are still unexplored. However, these protected areas are islands that are facing degradation through a number of activities, the latest of which is tourism. The pressures on the region range from subsistence agriculture to the extraction of forest products to tourism. The fact that 1.5 million people live in this landscape, with heavy dependence on landscape resources, has resulted in the need for "ntegrative" and "livelihood-linked" conservation. Because of the four jurisdictions, this region is an obvious candidate for some form of transboundary management or cooperation.