Abstract 

Mountains are places people often go to visit and enjoy themselves. But mountains are also complex ecosystems that provide diverse resources, such as food, water, and energy, for over half the population worldwide! Without mountains, our normal everyday life would not be sustainable for long. Unfortunately, there are many threats to mountain habitats around the world. We wanted to identify those threats and to find solutions to them. We found that politics pose the greatest threat to mountain ecosystems and that these ecosystems are best managed by local communities based on their own community needs.