Our climate project wins the international Mountain Future Award 2025 competition

I am pleased to announce that on International Mountain Day, December 11, 2025, we received the award for the most innovative project related to
climate change and glacier conservation. The award ceremony took place at the Mountain Partnership of the United Nations headquarters at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome.

As the project coordinator, I would like to highlight this achievement as a tribute to our outstanding Kyrgyz team: Azhybek Nurlanov, Murat Kaipov, Maksat, Emil, Alexander, and Gulbara Omorova. We are deeply grateful to the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics team – Ermanno Pietrosemoli Marco Rainone Marco Zennaro and Rytis Paskauskas for their technical expertise and constant support in navigating frontier technologies. And profound appreciation to our essential partners who made deployment possible: the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Kyrgyz Republic, the administration of the Sary-Chelek Nature Reserve and the Karatal-Zhapyryk State Nature Reserve, and scientific institutions across the Central Asian region. We are thankful to the Internet Society Foundation for financial support of our project.

The Internet Society Kyrgyz Chapter’s victory in the Mountain Future Award in the Innovation category validates our work in addressing a critical monitoring gap: in the Pan-Third Pole region, only 10% of weather stations operate above 2,000 meters, and less than 5% above 3,000 meters, despite the fact that these high-altitude zones contain glaciers and permafrost that are most vulnerable to climate change. Kyrgyzstan’s data from only two weather stations located above 2,000 meters was available to the international scientific community. We demonstrate that affordable, advanced meteorological telemetry sensors and technologies like LoRaWAN, Wifi HaLow and EdgeAI can scale monitoring at extreme altitudes, where data is critically needed.

At the end of my speech, I called on countries to recognize climate data as a digital public good to build resilient and sustainable mountain communities. In other words, make such data accessible and free. It still shocks me that in order to write research paper based on the official historical climate data on the cryosphere in Kyrgyzstan, a researcher should spend roughly $3,000-$5,000 for purchasing data from Kyrgyzhydromet, which is already a major barrier to new research. If you would need to know the mean temperature which was this day ten years ago, you need to pay 50 Kyrgyz Soms (57 US cents) for one figure only, while research requires extensive amount of data. Therefore I call all nations to make such data open, free of charge, machine friendly, the digital public good asset.

More information about the event can be found at: https://www.fao.org/webcast/detail/international-mountain-day-2025-high-level-event/en (the Mountain Future Award 2025 ceremony begins at the 57th minute).

#MountainsMatter #InternationalMountainDay #GlacierPreservation