Mountain Countries Compete to Voice Climate Concern

By: Navin Khadka on June 10th, 2010

Himalayan nation Nepal is facing competition in its bid to bring together mountainous countries to amplify their concerns on vulnerability to climate change.

During the ongoing UN climate change conference in the German city of Bonn, just as Nepalese officials announced an initiative to form a group, the Mountain Alliance Initiative, two Central Asian nations and one from the Caucasus outsmarted them by notifying the UN that they were establishing a similar group.

Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan got together and wrote to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) saying they had agreed to establish the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries.

Landlocked Nepal’s officials say the group it has announced will be effective in getting mountainous countries heard in international forums like UN climate conference.

“This alliance has been initiated so that mountainous countries can raise their climate-related concerns and influence the UNFCCC’s decision-making process to our advantage,” said Nepal’s environment ministry secretary Ganesh Joshi.

The three rival countries have stated almost the same reason for their move.

In their letter to the UNFCCC, they wrote: “We have agreed to establish the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries for protecting and lobbying for the interests of this group of countries in the framework of the UNFCCC’s negotiation process.”

While Nepalese officials have prepared a calendar to hold workshops and meetings between mountainous countries before requesting the UNFCCC to officially recognise the MAI, the other three have already done that.

“We request to the secretariat to take note of the new group and include it in all its listings,” the letter from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan read.

The UNFCCC has officially listed its member countries under several groups, including small island states, developing countries and least developed countries.

Nepalese officials think adequate attention has not been paid to the issues of mountainous countries in international climate negotiations.

“Our mountain ecology stands so vulnerable to climate change and we believe Nepal can ideally lead to bring that point to the fore,” said Madhab Karki, Deputy Director of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which is helping Nepal in its bid.

Although judged susceptible to the impacts of climate change, the Himalayan region has seen very little scientific research.

The most talked-about impact has been the retreat of Himalayan glaciers due to temperature increases caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

That has triggered fears of lakes and rivers swelling to dangerous levels in the near term and running dry in the long run, spelling disaster for millions of people in the region who rely on the river systems.

Increasing floods, droughts and landslides, the northward movement of some plant and animal species, a drop in water availability and agricultural production have been some of the observed results many link to climate change, although these are yet to be established scientifically.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has called the Himalayas a white spot, meaning there is a big information gap in this region.

And there are concerns that nothing much is being done to find out what has been happening to the mountain ecology as climate changes.

That was why, Nepalese officials say, the country’s Prime Minister, Madhab Kumar Nepal, addressing the climate change summit in Copenhagen last December, had proposed forming a common platform of mountain countries.

But while the Nepalese administration took time to move on with the idea, officials from Kyrgyzstan were already taking the lead.

“We had last year even before the Copenhagen conference floated the idea of bringing the mountainous countries together,” says Ysmail Dairov, who heads the Regional Mountain Centre of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek..

But he said several countries, particularly from South Asia, had not responded to the idea.

“At first they said this was something that would have to be done at the foreign ministry level. And even when we managed to send a letter from the Kyrgyz foreign ministry to the foreign ministries of these countries, there was no response.”

Nepalese officials say even they were approached by the Kyrgyz officials to join the Group of Mountain Landlocked Developing Countries.

“We don’t need to do that as we have support from many mountainous countries, including those in Latin America,” said Nepal’s environment secretary Joshi.

“Moreover, we are not just bringing together landlocked mountainous countries; our support base is quite a bit wider.”

That remains to be seen. But for now, the competition between Nepal and its rivals has left some mountainous countries bewildered.

“We don’t know what we do now,” says Abas Basir, Deputy Director of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency.

“But what we do know is that if they remain divided like this, the whole effort of amplifying the voice of mountainous countries will collapse.”