Local community will be involved to manage the Baltoro route, wildlife viewing and wildlife harvesting.
Role of women is tacit one, largely confined to promoting environmental awareness among women as primary users of natural resources.
Capacity - Building Component
The Ministries of Environment and Tourism and the local Baltistan administration whose institutional capacity will be strengthened by an infrastructure built in a region as inaccessible as the Baltoro.
Emphasis on Sustainable Livelihoods
The local village communities of Askole and surrounding areas, for whom the effective managemnet of the Baltoro route will provide a more stable income from mountain tourism, wildlife viewing, and wildlife harvesting, as well as the benefits of the community development.
Promoting Public Awareness of Global Environment
The project will encourage and assit facilities (e.g. print material, electronic media) that improve access to and information on environmental protection. It will also produce series of publiation on the geography, histroy, flora, fauna and culture of mountain areas.
Significant Participation of Indigenous Peoples
The success of the project depends on the local people coopeation, because the climate is tough and harsh and only local people are used to it and without their cooperation and support the objective cannot be achieved.
Project Results
The primary stakeholders in the project were the local village communities of Askole and surrounding areas, for whom the effective management of the Baltoro route will provide a more stable income from mountain tourism, wildlife viewing, and wildlife harvesting, as well as potential benefits of the future community development initiatives. To enhance the capacities of the local communities to take active part in the sustainable management of their local habitat community members have been trained in campsite and waste management and wildlife surveying. Under the project demarcated camps have been constructed at two sites (Jhula and Paiyu) and a system for the collection, disposal, and dispatch of waste for recycling have been put in place. Fees for camping has been decided by the communities and revenue generated from the camping fees is managed by the communities and will be used to pay the salaries of camp managers and wildlife watchers. The surplus revenue will be used for local development projects decided by the communities.
Lower altitudes of the Baltoro region have suffered increased deforestation, often as a result of economic underdevelopment and mismanaged natural resources among local communities. Adding to this is the porters? frequent cutting of trees and shrub for firewood due to non-provision of kerosene to porters from the local tour operators. To address this issue MGPO has taken a multi-pronged approach through raising awareness among the local population about the effects of deforestation and planting of trees at the campsites and promoting the use of kerosene both among the porters and among the travel agents. The latter has led to some resistance from tour operators, which are the ones responsible for providing kerosene. MGPO is engaged in dialogue with these to find ways to work together and make tourism development a sustainable and profitable business for all.
The Baltoro is home to a diverse range of mountain wildlife such as fox, wolf, markhor, urial and Tibetan argali as well as a number of endangered species such as ibex, brown bear and snow leopard. As no up to date baseline data exists on the actual wildlife population in the area, however, the project has facilitated training of five local community members in basic wildlife surveying techniques by IUCN. They have taken a keen interest in wildlife surveying and are submitting regular wildlife survey reports to the IUCN office in Skardu. For the first year the wildlife guards were paid a monthly salary by the project, the communities have however agreed to pay the wildlife surveyors from the revenue generated from the camping fees so that activities can be sustained after the end of the project.
The annual stream of trekking tourists and climbers will be facilitated by a basic infrastructure along the Baltoro and MGPO will develop information materials to inform trekkers about existing rules and regulation so that they can help in enforcing them.
Some of the major achievements of the Baltoro Environmental Protection Programme can be summarized as follows:
The infrastructure put in place by MGPO provides a base for efforts toward environmental management and the conservation of biodiversity. The impact of tourists and mountaineers has been limited by establishing demarcated campsites managed by the local communities and by raising the awareness among locals, porters, travel agents, the local administration and tourists.
A community based management system has been put in place that will help generate income, thus creating financial incentive among the local communities to conserve biodiversity and providing a local financial mechanism with which to manage natural resources.
The Project has managed to bring together and increase cooperation between the different local communities that depend on tourism and porterage for a substantial part of their income during the summer and in this way laid the foundation for joint community collaboration for natural resources management in the valley.
The project has addressed the lack of awareness of sustainable use of natural resources among local communities through training and demonstration and are promoting environmental awareness among local community women on their role in conservation.
