Mountains have been the victims of climate change for far too long; the neglect to these landscapes is reflected through retreating glaciers and the disproportionate impacts on mountain communities. All this, while the word “mountains” has barely appeared in the documents which shape and guide the world’s climate response (1,2). For such regions which are the birthplace of the world’s largest rivers, regulate global climate patterns, and directly and indirectly provide life and livelihood to a significant population on earth, mountain-specific climate policies are simply a must, and the fact that they have not yet been formulated is nothing less than a travesty.
However, things are starting to look up as mountains are receiving global recognition through the UNFCCC’s new Dialogue on Mountains and Climate Change. In June 2026, the UNFCCC convened for this dialogue in Bonn, Germany – a full-day mandated session (3) that is arguably the most significant institutional recognition mountain regions have ever received in climate negotiations. For Nepal, a country whose identity, economy, and vulnerability are inseparable from the Himalaya, this is a moment worth understanding and building on.
The Context: what are the COP and SBs?
Anyone who follows climate news would probably be aware of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP), a summit where all Parties, nearly 200 governments, negotiate the world’s climate response. As an example, the famous Paris Agreement was an outcome of COP21 held in Paris in 2015 (2). The most recent COP30 was held in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, and the upcoming COP31 will be held in Antalya, Türkiye.
However, the activities that are undertaken at the COP are merely the visible tip of the iceberg of a much larger, year-round process. Twice a year (and always in the run-up to COP), the UNFCCC convenes its two Subsidiary Bodies: the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), which handles the technical and scientific side of the negotiations, and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI), which focuses on turning commitments into action on the ground. These SB sessions are held in Bonn, home to the UNFCCC Secretariat, and are where much of the detailed, unglamorous work of the climate regime actually happens: technical guidelines, workstream mandates, expert dialogues, and the groundwork that later gets ratified or announced at COP.
This is exactly the track through which mountains have made their way into the UNFCCC system, it did not happen all at once. Mountain vulnerability has technically been recognized since the Convention's earliest texts, such as how Article 4 and the preamble both flag “developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems” as deserving particular consideration. But recognition on paper is different from a seat in the room. The real shift began at COP28, when the outcome of the first Global Stocktake explicitly named mountains, forests, and oceans as ecosystems of concern and mandated a first expert dialogue on mountains and climate change which was held in 2024 and focused on technical knowledge-sharing between scientists, policymakers, and frontline communities (3).
That 2024 dialogue was useful, but it was still a fairly narrow, technical affair. Mountain-advocating governments such as Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan, Andorra, Peru and others kept pushing for something bigger: a standing, higher-profile space where mountain issues could be discussed not just as science, but as policy (1,3). That push paid off at COP30 in Belém, where Parties formally requested the SBSTA and SBI Chairs to convene a new dialogue which would this time include explicit consideration of whether mountains deserve an annual dialogue going forward. That request led directly to the SB64 dialogue held in Bonn on 12th June 2026 (3).
The Mountain Dialogue and why it matters
The SB64 Dialogue on Mountains and Climate Change, co-facilitated by Bhutan and Switzerland with support from the UNFCCC secretariat, was built around three objectives (3):
Share learnings and identify support needs: how are countries actually integrating mountain risk into their National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs).
Map entry points within existing UNFCCC workstreams such as adaptation, loss and damage, and finance, where mountain-specific risks and solutions can be plugged in more effectively.
Consider the future: should there be a recurring, perhaps annual, dialogue on mountains, and if so, in what form?
The scale of the problem discussed left little room for doubt about why this matters. Mountains cover roughly a quarter of the planet's land surface, generate more than half of the world's freshwater, and are warming at nearly two times the global average. The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) alone has lost glacier mass at a pace that has accelerated sharply in recent years, and permafrost thaw is now implicated in disasters as far apart as Chamoli in India and Melamchi in Nepal. Roughly a billion people live in mountain regions; two billion more depend on the water that flows down from them. As ICIMOD's Director General, Dr. Pema Gyamtsho, put in his keynote address: the scientific case is no longer in question, and the real task now is turning recognition into investment and action (3).
What emerged from the day was less a single decision than a candid mapping of both progress and unfinished business. On the positive side, delegates found that mountains already have real footholds across the UNFCCC architecture: in the Global Goal on Adaptation, the Nairobi Work Programme (which has a dedicated cryosphere and high-latitude focus), the Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage, and the Global Stocktake cycle. The problem isn't a lack of hooks to hang the curtain of mountain issues on, it's that those hooks are scattered and poorly connected, so mountain risk still gets diluted inside broader categories like “water” or “agriculture” rather than tracked and financed as its own priority (3).
The consensus was thinner on the more difficult topics of finance and institutional reform. Speaker after speaker cited the same two bottlenecks: a shortage of hard data (many mountain regions still have only a handful of monitoring stations for tens of thousands of glaciers and glacial lakes) and a persistent finance gap, estimated by different speakers at anywhere from USD 170 billion a year globally to USD 12 trillion for the HKH region alone. And on whether mountains should get a dedicated annual dialogue, a standing agenda item, or simply tighter integration into the existing Global Stocktake cycle, opinion was genuinely split (3). Countries like India and the African Group insisted that whatever comes next must stay voluntary and non-prescriptive, without adding new reporting burdens on developing countries, a reminder that even a cause as broadly sympathetic as mountain resilience still runs into the UNFCCC's familiar fault lines over differentiated responsibilities (1,3). The co-facilitators will fold all of this into an oral summary report to COP31, and whether further negotiations lead to a decision is yet to be seen.
Nepal’s role and what’s at stake
Nepal was not a bystander in Bonn, but was in fact one of the dialogue's most visible voices. Nepal has arguably done more sustained diplomatic work on the mountain agenda than almost any other country, going back to its original push for a “Mountain Initiative” coalition around COP15 in 2009. That early effort eventually lost momentum, in part because Nepal's own diplomatic attention shifted when it took on leadership of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Group (4). But the underlying case Nepal was making on how mountain-specific vulnerability deserves its own recognition, distinct from generic developing-country categories, has only grown stronger with time and Kathmandu has kept returning to it through its NDCs, hosting the inaugural Sagarmatha Sambaad dialogue in May 2025 (2), and Maheshwar Dhakal's direct participation on the SB64 panel (3).
At Bonn, Nepal's delegation made a case with real weight behind it. Mountain-region impacts in Nepal run two to three times more severe than in the lowlands, a claim borne out by the flooding crises in areas like Ilam, Kathmandu, and around Everest that Nepal cited directly. Nepal used the platform to reframe the narrative it wants the world to adopt: away from mountains as disaster zones and toward mountains as opportunity for nature-based tourism, hydropower, and clean energy investment all the while insisting that the science underpinning all of this remain non-negotiable in the negotiations. Ghanshyam Pandey of Nepal's Green Foundation added a complementary, community-level case: Nepal's community forestry programme, which now manages over 2.2 million hectares through more than 23,000 local groups and helped lift national forest cover from roughly 39% to 46%, was held up as proof that local and indigenous stewardship isn't a nice-to-have element alongside climate policy but is often the mechanism that delivers it (3).
What does this mean practically for Nepal going forward?
A stronger case for finance. If mountain risk becomes more clearly trackable across NDCs, NAPs, BTRs and the Global Goal on Adaptation, Nepal has a better argument for accessing dedicated adaptation and loss-and-damage finance, including through the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage such as for glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, and permafrost-related hazards that are already costing lives and infrastructure (2,3).
A louder voice, if coalitions hold. The old lesson from Bhandary's research on Nepal's earlier coalition attempts still applies: mountain countries are more powerful together than apart (1). The 11-member Mountain Group and the wider set of countries that spoke in Bonn (Kyrgyzstan, Andorra, Peru, Lesotho, Pakistan, Armenia and others) represent exactly the kind of coalition-building opportunity Nepal has been chasing since 2009, this time with a much stronger evidentiary and institutional foundation than existed then (1,3).
An open institutional question Nepal has a stake in shaping. Whether the world ends up with an annual mountain dialogue, a dedicated agenda item, or simply tighter integration into the Global Stocktake cycle is still unresolved (3). Given how much of Nepal's diplomatic capital has been invested in this cause over fifteen years, how that question gets answered at COP31 will dictate how durable Nepal's gains turn out to be.
A domestic homework list. The dialogue also implicitly set expectations Nepal will need to keep meeting: continuing to weave mountain risk visibly into its NDCs and NAPs, investing in the monitoring and data infrastructure that international partners keep flagging as the weakest link, and making sure the loss-and-damage case is backed by rigorous, bankable figures rather than general appeals (2,3).
None of this guarantees a breakthrough. The SB64 dialogue closed with real disagreement still on the table, and previous mountain coalitions have withered before at exactly such a stage where there is strong technical convergence, but unresolved institutional follow-through (4). But for the first time, mountain countries walked into a UNFCCC room with a full day, an explicit mandate, and a direct line to a COP decision. For Nepal, that is the opening its diplomats have been working toward since Copenhagen (1,2). The test now is whether that opening turns into the annual, well-resourced platform Nepal and its allies have been asking for, or fades, as it has before, once the cameras and delegations move on to the next agenda item.
References
Linus Höller, “Moving Mountains: Common Policy Goals among Landlocked, Mountainous Countries May Serve as a Basis for UNFCCC Coalition-Building” (capstone research paper, Northwestern University, 7 June 2023).
Bharat Khanal, “Nepal’s Climate Diplomacy: Key Takeaways,” Journal of Environment Sciences XI (2025): 136–142, https://doi.org/10.3126/jes.v11i1.80590.
Dialogue on Mountains and Climate Change - Mandated Event, UNFCCC SB 64, Bonn, 12 June 2026: https://unfccc.int/event/mountains-cc-dialogue
Rishikesh Ram Bhandary, “Coalition Strategies in the Climate Negotiations: An Analysis of Mountain-Related Coalitions,” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 17, no. 2 (2017): 173–90, cited in Höller, “Moving Mountains.”