Mountaineering and the natural environment in developing countries: an insight to a comprehensive approach

Mountaineering, broadly defined as hiking, trekking and climbing, is nowadays a mass phenomenon. Sensitive to outside influences, the environment of high mountain areas, until recently cut off from civilisation, has been abruptly exposed to it. The environment of high mountain areas has clearly been affected. The balance of environmental profit and loss depends on a number of factors and circumstances. The paper argues that within populated areas (inhabited and agricultural exploited), mountaineering – contrary to widespread opinion – has an impact on the natural environment that is almost always positive, but above populated areas it is almost always negative. The authors propose a qualitative model for this thesis.