Courses

Introduction

The sustainable management of mountain areas is crucial to protect mountain ecosystems and ensure that they continue to support our life with the essential goods and services provided.

The youth and children of today will be the stewards of the planet tomorrow. For the first time, this IPROMO course is targeting exclusively young practitioners under 35, mainly from developing countries. The participants will be asked to contribute to promoting awareness about the challenges faced by mountains and to engage in supporting the mountain agenda globally.

The relevance of mountains has been recently confirmed by the decision of the United Nations General Assembly to declare 2022 as the International Year of Sustainable Mountain Development (IYM2022). Moreover, 2021 marked the first year of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, reiterating the importance of preventing, halting, and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.

This year will also mark the sixteenth annual IPROMO course. Since then, more than 500 people from all over the world have been trained and have shared their knowledge. Since 2021, a parallel IPROMO course in Spanish is held in Latin America.

This year's course will focus on three main topics: a) understanding the sustainable management of mountain forests, b) identifying specific policies that can support sustainable mountain forest management, c) and understanding how to involve youth in the effort better.

Mountains and their resources are critical for a healthy planet. Mountains provide freshwater to more than half of humanity, host about half of the world's biodiversity hotspots, provide habitat to 25 percent of terrestrial biodiversity and distinctive human communities, and are widely covered by forests (about 40 percent of the entire mountain area).

The role of mountains as a refuge and reservoir for biodiversity is expected to increase as lowland species migrate to cooler highlands in response to rising global temperatures. This could pose a threat to flora and fauna in mountain areas, but at the same time, mountains will be vital to support lowland species' survival.

Mountain landscapes are increasingly exposed to hazards such as floods, accelerated soil erosion, landslides, avalanches, wildfires and are subject to land-use conversion and the unsustainable use of resources. These multifaceted challenges threaten the integrity of mountain landscapes and the resilience of their biodiversity as well as the livelihoods of mountain communities. The loss of ecosystem integrity often means increasing poverty and hunger for mountain peoples who are already amongst the world's poorest and food insecure. Furthermore, as resources become scarce, resource-use conflicts arise, forcing many communities to migrate elsewhere, often with severe negative implications for their social fabric, such as their traditional knowledge, cultures, and languages.

IPROMO is a training programme promoted in the framework of the Mountain Partnership and meant to be a contribution to better understanding the challenges faced by mountain ecosystems and mountain peoples and to catalyze action towards the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in mountains as well as the 2023-2027 Five Years of Action for the Development of the Mountain Regions.

Objectives
The IPROMO 2023 Summer School will focus on policies, tools and skills that contribute to sustainable and integrated management of mountain areas.

This year's topics will include understanding key issues related to sustainable mountain development such as mountain forests and ecosystems services, livelihoods and enterprise development, climate change, governance and policy, and agroforestry.