International Mountain Day
Our guest blogger, Professor Martin Price - Director of the Centre for Mountain Studies, writes:
Since 2003, 11 December has been International Mountain Day – a chance to celebrate mountains and create awareness about their importance to all of us. “We are all mountain people; we are all dependent on mountains, connected to them, and affected by them”. So, ran the motto for the International Year of Mountains in 2002 - where the idea of this special day originated.
2020 has been a very unusual year for everyone - whether we live in, or visit, the mountains, or depend on them in other ways. The water that many of us rely on has continued flowing from the mountains but, for much of the year, people living in towns and cities were not able to visit either the mountains of Scotland or those overseas. For everyone who likes to get out into the hills, this was a challenging period – but at the same time, there were almost no mountain rescue call-outs. Then, when the restrictions were lifted, very large numbers of us visited – for the Lomond Rescue Team, call-outs were double the usual rate.
For people living in the Highlands, and other mountain areas, this has been a year of uncertainty. About whether coronavirus would reach them, what the effects might be, and whether their businesses (such as B&B’s, campsites, and restaurants) would survive. At the end of lockdown, many restarted their businesses, but the large numbers of visitors led to heavy pressures in many areas - with challenges relating to wild camping; refuse and sanitation; and traffic jams. One of our doctoral researchers, Leonie Schulz, has been studying the possible impacts of the twinning of the A9 - and many of the tourism and conservation experts she interviewed, commented that 2020 (post-lockdown) may be a model for how the future might look in the mountains along the A9 corridor.
The topic ‘Challenging upland futures’ was to have been the focus of the Centre for Mountain Studies’ 20th anniversary event in September 2020. When we planned this with a diverse group of stakeholders, the challenges that we were expecting to discuss and plan for included: climate change; deer and grouse management; rewilding; and land reform. All of these challenges still exist, and have been explored in a special issue of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society newsletter. ‘The Geographer’. However, this year has also made us aware of other challenges, and our rescheduled event in October next year will be even more urgent – to come up with priority actions that help ensure that our uplands deliver the widest possible range of benefits for us all - as 2020 has taught us to plan for uncertainty and change.
Listen to the University of the Highlands and Islands #FutureMe podcast with Leonie Schulz -PHD student from the Centre for Mountain Studies - where she discusses the future of mountain regions, with Mike Pescod from School of Adventure Studies.
