Nepal's government is planning to highlight the defrosting of the Himalaya by holding a cabinet meeting at Mount Everest base camp and holding a 'Summit of the Summiteers" of celebrity mountaineers at the Copenhagen climate conference next month.

"We want to draw world attention to the impact of global warming on the mountains and what it means for the 1.2 billion people in Nepal and Asia who depend on these mountains for their water," Forest minister Deepak Bohara told Nepali Times. The base camp is located at 5,300 m and cabinet ministers are expected to fly there by helicopter.

Bohara's ministry plans to hold a rally on the streets of Copenhagen on December 11 in which multiple Everest summiteers like Apa Sherpa and Dawa Steven Sherpa and Italian climber Reinhold Messner and Japanese Junko Tabei will take part. Apa Sherpa has climbed the world's highest mountain a record 19 times, Dawa Steven Sherpa twice. Messner was the first person to climb Everest without oxygen 25 years ago and Tabei was the first woman on the summit.

Like the Base Camp cabinet meeting, Bohara says he hopes the rally will highlight the problems of glacial retreat, melting permafrost and climate variability is having on Nepal.

The Himalaya is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet, and glaciers in Nepal are in full retreat forming large lakes that are in danger of bursting.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, the Maldivian president held his cabinet meeting underwater, where President Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials donned scuba diving suits and sat at a table on the ocean floor.