Socio-economic vulnerabilities and impacts
The foregoing discussion of the indicators of environmental change and human driving forces has already alluded to some socioeconomic impacts of environmental changes. In fact, some of the second- or third-order changes in the status of environmental resources are manifestations of impacts of people's adjustment to environmental changes. For such reasons, at times it is difficult to separate precisely the impacts of environmental changes as causes of socio-economic disruptions from the environmental changes as consequences of socioeconomic adjustment. Similarly, at times it is difficult to separate the socio-economic impacts resulting from environmental changes and those resulting from the forces underlying environmental change.
Such dilemmas prevail because socio-economic impacts are products of overall transformation processes, which involve simultaneously both the environmental variables and the factors affecting them. Hence, we may talk more comfortably about the socioeconomic impacts of change (i.e. transformation process) with a special focus on the environmental components of this transformation.
Accordingly, in the first place, the transformation processes have disrupted the overall production base and interlinkages of land-based activities, which evolved through adaptations to specific conditions of mountain habitats (tables 4.7-4.10). Ineffectiveness or infeasibility of several traditional production and resource-management practices due to the above changes may be treated as manifestations of socioeconomic vulnerabilities. The changed status and productivity of environmental resources are important factors behind such vulnerabilities.
As a consequence of the marginalization of age-old and well-tested components of traditional farming systems, the mountain communities (most of which depend on agriculture) are