Regional Action and Global Advocacy

With scientists predicting devastating near-term impacts of climate change on people’s water and food security, livelihoods and energy sources, and nature already in rapid decline across the HKH, urgent international action, financial support and regional cooperation is needed to help communities and governments prepare and adapt. We are working to ensure the crises faced by the HKH are met with the commensurate urgency nationally, regionally and globally. Highlights from our work in 2024 include:

We continued to foster multi-stakeholder partnerships to enhance collaboration on climate resilience, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable development. Responding to the HKH Call to Action, declared at the First Ministerial Mountain Summit in 2020, we continued efforts towards establishing a high-level institutional mechanism for strengthening regional collaboration. The High-Level Task Force produced its Recommendation Report to establish a Ministerial Council. Based on feedback and advice received from relevant authorities, it was agreed to continue with the Biennial Ministerial Mountain Summit instead of a Council. While the planned Ministerial Meeting in Bangladesh in September 2024 could not be held, ICIMOD obtained the support of the Government of Bhutan to host an HKH Environment Ministers’ Meeting at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The team took significant strides to elevate the needs and challenges of the HKH region on the global stage. ICIMOD’s presence in essential science-policy fora contributed to inserting HKH issues and needs into key statements and documents, thus helping ensure the HKH is reflected and primed to trigger potential actions on increased investment flows into the region. We successfully engaged with RMC focal points to promote mountain needs and perspectives in global fora (UNFCCC, CBD, IPCC and IPBES). In our recent initiative for Leveraging investment, we identified the region’s climate finance needs and gaps, and the associated policy, institutional and innovation pathways required to leverage investment flows into the HKH. We created an Advisory Working Group with global agencies to guide this work.