European Mountain Convention, Chambéry, France

From 02/10/2012 to 04/10/2012

Youth to the top: the mountain path to the future!
Creating a future for young people in mountain areas

Read the Final declaration " Improving attractiveness of mountain areas for young generations"
Read the press release

Overall presentation

The objective of this year's European Mountain Convention was to discuss the potentials mountain areas offer to young people and to evaluate the conditions that are needed to unlock the attractiveness of mountain areas for young people. The convention provides participants with opportunities to discuss difficulties and good practices responding to specific issues and policies concerning youth in the mountains.

Like all other European Mountain Conventions, this edition gathered some 300 participants from 18 European countries, Armenia, Georgia and US.

Mountain areas have very important assets in terms of quality of life: community exchanges particularly intense, a rich traditional culture, access to a protected environment and leisure activities as well as many different job opportunities. But these spaces are often dependent of an image shifted, sometimes sluggish, nor diversified.

This Convention fought this shifted image with arguments highlighting the richness and strengths of these areas and addressed the current problems that young people (and mountain inhabitants in general) face on a daily base offering transferable solutions to these problems.

Thus, the key issues for this Youth Convention were "How to keep young people in mountain areas: how to settle back after graduation and how to attract new young people, individual or family from other territories in our mountain regions?".