Modelling of environmental and economic costs and benefits of the management of the mountain huts of the Aosta Valley – Italy

Management of mountain huts is inserted in a particularly fragile ecosystem, i.e. the mountains, to which they are linked by a relationship of mutual interdependence. As a business activity, the mountain hut interacts with the surrounding environment, and in doing so, generates inevitable impacts on this. As regards the public administration, the mountain hut category may represent a potential recipient of resources to the extent that it decides to encourage application of measures able to mitigate such impacts. This work describes a system of modelling the mountain hut activity at a double scale. The first describes the processes of the activity of each mountain hut and the relationships between these and protection of the surrounding environment, while the second level aggregates the individual models of 35 mountain huts of the Aosta Valley and describes system behaviour according to various strategies at aggregate level. The final aim is to establish, where sufficient quantitative data is available, a definition of costs and benefits such as to permit economic and environmental assessment of a suite of management and technological strategies at the level of each mountain hut or at aggregate level.