Abstract ID: 3.13194 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

International and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) can play an important role in environmental protection by providing collaborative frameworks for governments and other actors to address issues that transcend national borders. International environmental policy instruments such as MEAs could be especially important and relevant in mountains, given their transboundary nature and their role in safeguarding ecosystems and their governance.

Despite their recognized global importance, mountains appear underrepresented in international environmental law or explicitly mentioned in MEAs, such as the Alpine Convention and the Carpathian Convention. Nevertheless, and despite many MEAs existing, few analyses have been conducted that identify if and how MEAs that don’t explicitly mention mountains could have thematic relevance over mountainous territories.

To address this gap, and as a contribution to GEO Mountains, an analysis was conducted by spatializing over 1400 treaties contained in the International Environmental Agreements Database (IEADB) to provide an overview of the extent to which agreements listed in this database directly relate or are relevant to mountainous territories, both spatially and thematically. Following an in-depth text analysis of the treaties, we categorised treaties across three categories: mountain-specific, potentially mountain-relevant, and all others. Agreements counted as “potentially mountain-relevant” do not necessarily mention mountains, explicitly, but which nevertheless can relate to mountainous territories given their thematic scope to issues of relevance to mountains. A spatial dataset representing the coverage of all treaties across these categories was produced. This output enables the visualisation of treaties coverage, which can further facilitate the identification of gaps and opportunities to mainstream efforts and support broader mountain governance goals.

Our results show that while numerous treaties indirectly relate to mountain areas, with only a handful explicitly targeting them, opportunities exist to leverage on the thematic scope of non-mountain specific MEAs and highlight their relevance and application in context. The dataset could be used for further exploration of these opportunities, and many other applications, thereby serving as an important tool for future research or for monitoring and evaluation purposes in the field of international mountain governance.