Believing that mountains can serve as inspiration, conscience, and model for community-based conservation in the next millennium, The Mountain Institute is committed to preserving mountain environments and advancing mountain cultures throughout the world. Mountains are the source of some 80% of the earth's surface water. Their altitude changes create diverse ecosystems, sanctuaries for plant and animal species losing ground elsewhere. Isolation and adaptation also nurture a remarkable variety of human cultures deeply rooted communities adapted to their fragile environments.

The Mountain Institute celebrates the unique character and educational value of mountains and the contributions of mountain peoples. Mountains are home to human communities that have adapted their life-styles to coexist with their environments in remote and rugged lands. Mountains force us to seek creative solutions to stretch our capacity for ingenuity, innovation, and self help. Mountains exert strong spiritual and emotional influences. They represent our highest goals and the grandest visions we dream. Sacred space to over 1 billion people worldwide, mountains are revered and awe-inspiring landscapes.

Mountains are characterized by verticality and diversity and exhibit tremendous variation in vegetation, soils, and climate over relatively short distances. They are globally significant reservoirs of biodiversity, sheltering rich assemblages of species and ecosystems. They harbor numerous endemic and threatened species, valuable medicinal and food plants, important biological corridors, and sanctuaries for plants and animals long since eliminated from the more transformed lowlands. Mountains are also fragile, high-energy environments that protect downstream drainages and are particularly sensitive indicators of global climatic change.

The attraction and wonder of the mountains is undeniable. But fragile mountain environments are easily disturbed. Physical barriers can crate social and economic ones. Mountain communities are typically small, self-reliant, and intimately connected with their highly complex natural environments. But they are also often extremely poor and ill-equipped to deal with the environmental and social challenges of development, tourism, resource-extracting industries, and lowland approaches that are not adapted to their unique circumstances.

The Mountain Institute recognizes the unique promise and peril of the world's mountains and works actively with community partners and global leaders to create locally appropriate programs that address mountain priorities. For over two decades, the Institute has developed the specific expertise for conservation and sustainable and equitable development within these diverse, changing, and challenging environments.