[3] The Bale Mountains play a vital role in climate control of the region by attracting large amounts of orographic rainfall, which has obvious implications for livestock and agricultural production.

People living south of the national park are completely dependent on good management of the water resources from the highland areas.

If the flow of these rivers is altered in any way – through deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and/or over abstraction for irrigation (all of which are occurring at present) – a highland/lowland imbalance results with loss of perennial water in the lowlands.

If such a situation arises, the dry season range of the people and their livestock reduces dramatically and they concentrate about whatever water source remains.

Surrounded by East African pencil juniper (Juniperus procera) trees and St. John’s wort, waist-high wildflowers and grasses grow in the Northern Grasslands and Woodlands.

The Plateau is also dotted with alpine lakes and streams, providing important resident wildlife resources, as well as wintering and passage stations for rare and regionally endemic birds.

The Harenna Forest plant community makes up about half of the park, a woodland of trees draped in moss and lichens that seem to drip off the branches.

[11] At least 7 species of endemic Amphibians are discovered in forested swampy areas and Bale Mountains National park plateaus.

The Bale Mountains are the true ancestral home of the Oromo, the largest single ethnic group in the Horn of Africa.

They are part of the eastern Cushitic people stemming from a branch of the Caucasoid race (which includes Western Asians, Arabs and Europeans), and are distributed from Wello in Ethiopia's north, to Mombasa in Kenya to the south.

Some 3,000 years ago, they passed on practices such as the initiation ceremony of circumcision and the habit of not eating fish to Nilotic peoples in the West.

In this system, livestock, particularly cattle, are sent to higher grazing grounds during the months when crops are growing in lower altitudes or into the forest for shade during the dry season.

Dogs transmit rabies and canine distemper, and in 2010 killed 106 individuals (approximately 40% of the Bale population of Ethiopian wolves).

Over 12 million people, their livestock, and the environment in the south of Ethiopia as well as neighboring Somalia and northern Kenya rely on the water that originates from the Bale massif.

Conservationists suggest that if conservation efforts in the Bale Mountains are not successful and people continue to exploit the resources in an unsustainable way, more species of mammal would go extinct than in any other area of equivalent size on the planet.