The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, founded in the early 1980s and based in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, is the only intergovernmental body gathering
cross-border environmental information and monitoring climate change across a region stretching from the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan in the west to Yunnan in southwest China in the east.
U.S. scientists are exchanging
information with their counterparts in Arabic - language regions who have a keen interest in water desalination, food security, drought response and other
cross-border environmental issues.