Every year the world celebrates the International Mountain Day on 11 December. This international day was launched for the first time in 2003 and since then, it has become a symbolic date to acknowledge the uniqueness of mountains across the world. This year’s theme for the International Mountain Day is “Women move mountains”. To celebrate this day, Euromontana and the MOVING project – an international and multidisciplinary project to strengthen the resilience of mountain products value chains – published a booklet titled “Women move Europe’s mountains”.
What can you find in the booklet?
With this booklet, we want to welcome and celebrate this year’s International Mountain Day theme. Making a fresh, inclusive narrative for the future of mountains is a small but crucial first step.
This booklet is a compilation of 13 testimonies from women who either live in mountain areas of Europe or work to make them more sustainable and future oriented. Their testimonies unite the voices, narratives, and perspectives of women operating in several fields important to the future of mountains who hail from various mountain ranges in Europe.
The booklet presents the testimonies of women from the Euromontana network and the MOVING project who contribute to the sustainable development of their territories, such as Laura Gascon Herrero, Senior Project Officer at the Provincial Government of Teruel, and Anna Giorgi, Professor at Unimont University.
No sustainable mountain development without women
This booklet also demonstrates how important women’s roles are in their communities. It highlights that mountain women face similar challenges, and above all, lack of adequate recognition. Lastly, this brochure also looks at the opportunities that women have in mountain areas.
As years passed, the predominant vision about mountains as mere “fragile ecosystems” has been increasingly challenged. A new narrative that looks at mountains as territories of opportunity has emerged and is becoming more and more widely accepted.
On this special day for mountains, we thus call on policy makers at all levels to acknowledge the contribution of rural, remote and mountain areas to Europe’s green and digital transition, and more particularly the role of communities, who need to see their role fully recognized in this new narrative.
We also firmly believe that this transformation towards more sustainable, liveable and future-oriented mountain areas cannot be achieved without women. Women are a key pillar of mountain regions.
Read our booklet in English or French!
11 December 2022
