Session 1. 5. A.

The Himalayas mountains geographically encompass Nepal and Bhutan and parts of India, Pakistan, and China. The Himalayas, referred to as the water tower of Asia, is a crucial ecological and geological asset for billions of people in South Asia that provides ecosystem services to the mountain as well as downstream populations in terms of food, energy, water, medicines, and tourism among others. However, with rising environmental change, it is increasingly becoming vulnerable to disasters including landslides, earthquakes, unbalanced river flows, glacier melt, and air pollution.

Since it is a heavily politicized and militarised region, with states embroiled in complex border and political disputes, the security perspective in the region has been dominated by the military and political sectors in terms of traditional border disputes between the countries leading to mutual distrust. Non-traditional security threats including environmental insecurities like climate change, and water-food-energy insecurities have been recognized as a challenge but remain at the periphery of the security discourse. However, the countries have yet to be able to devise a regional effort toward addressing them. As a result, there is an emerging “security complex” in the Himalayas' environmental sector, leading to complex security interdependence amongst the countries.

Since, the environment as an issue has remained at the periphery of regional discourse, the paper seeks to discuss the challenges and opportunities that the Himalayas witness in terms of securitizing the environment and governing the mountain system. Contrary to other mountain regions like the Alps and the Carpathians, the region has not been able to develop an effective way of governance. It discusses, the environmental insecurities in the region and how they are forming into a security complex of its own in the environmental sector. Furthermore, it discusses challenges and opportunities in governing the mountain system of the Himalayas. Moreover, it draws a comparison of the Himalayan mountains and other mountains like the Alps in terms of regional governance. Lastly, it discusses the prospects and scope for securitizing and effective governance of the Himalayan mountains.

Fire is a crucial tool for tropical subsistence agriculture, but without proper control, it can lead to unintended wildfires. Through a combination of agricultural calendars, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with over 60 farmers during four months of fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes, we evaluated current agricultural burning practices. Quechua farmers utilize fire to clear agricultural residue, manage weeds and shrubs, and prepare new or fallow land, mostly during the dry season. They demonstrate an understanding of fire behavior shaped by fuel, topography, and weather conditions, paralleling Western controlled burn practices. Despite this, escaped fires are common, though most are managed within an hour, with few requiring broader community intervention. Adaptation to changing fire risks is already underway, as farmers adjust their burning practices in response to evolving legal, communal, and environmental conditions. This study highlights the need for governments to support, rather than suppress, fire use by offering modern wildfire risk tools and technical assistance, aligning with farmers' existing knowledge and the challenges posed by increasing flammability in highland landscapes. These findings advocate for adaptive fire management approaches that can be applied in mountain regions and diverse settings across the Global South.

Until mid-last century, extensive farming systems in Portuguese mountainous areas relied on common land, the baldios, mostly used for grazing and for gathering livelihoods. These resources were used and managed jointly by the villagers, according to locally created institutions. In the following years, several socioeconomic and political events contributed to the gradual distancing of people from their lands. For instances, the cattle and the woods were replaced by monocultures of pine trees, as part of a national project that aimed to turn baldios into productive territories for the whole nation. As an alternative to the harsh life conditions, from the 1960’s on, people fled from rural areas to the cities and abroad.
In 1974, with democracy reinstated, baldios were formally returned to the peoples, within a legal framework, revised last time in 2017. That year was also marked by the occurrence of the most destructive rural fires ever registered in Portugal. Following the catastrophe, public institutions lost credibility in the forest matters and conditions were gathered for a paradigm shift. In this context, in 2019 the Government launched a pilot-project aiming to group baldios and encourage cooperation between scarcely populated communities and thus boost local forest management.
So far 19 groups of baldios were created and a second project round aims to create 10 more. We look at the process of grouping baldios by focusing on two cases, one in the centre, where fire destroyed part of the forest, and the other in the north. Differences in the starting conditions of each group led to completely different outputs and perspectives, highlighting the gap between centrally designed public policies and its adequacy to territorial conditions. We conclude that despite depopulation, there is ground for baldios’ local management, however diversity among the baldios needs to be considered and allowed when policy is put into practice.

Recent discoveries of important lithium deposits in Peru suggest that the lithium boom in South America’s Altiplano is expanding. Along with salt flats in the ‘lithium Triangle’ of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, which share 55% of the world's reserves, in Peru, lithium is found in the world’s biggest tropical glacial (Quelcaya) and within the ancestral territory of peasant communities. In this context, this article contributes to discussions about just energy transitions and lithium extraction by exploring the new case of Peru as a potential global lithium producer, an economic and geopolitical goal strongly promoted by state authorities. Some scholars have focused on the diverse discursive strategies and imaginaries of state officials in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia to promote lithium exploitation as a sustainable kind of extractivism that supports the energy transition (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2021; Barandiarán 2018). Others have delved into how the grassroots mobilizes contested lithium discourses and imaginaries that shape overlapping territorialities and a revalorization of “the indigenous” (Dorn & Gundermann 2022; Soto and Newell 2022) or even conceive lithium as a socioecological and ontologically contested entity that sustains and participates in complex webs of life-supporting, place-based, and more-than-human relations (Quevedo 2023). These dynamics show how similar narratives are invoked to justify divergent paths of action depending on the different interests and temporalities of the actors involved (Carrasco et al. 2023). Considering the relevance of grasping these differences, this study relies on semi-structured interviews with national and sub-national state officials and regional indigenous organizations and fieldwork with peasant communities in the areas of two lithium projects in Puno, Peru. Unlike previous contributions, the article distinguishes between lithium discourses, imaginaries, and ontologies and unravels the spaces of contestation and articulations that shape the material possibilities of lithium extraction in a new extractive frontier.