Sameer Budhathoki

Once the sky cracks open over the fragile land of the Himalayas, the resulting fury does not discriminate between a remote alpine hamlet and a bustling downstream market town. In the past few weeks, monstrous mudslides and floods in Nepal have swept through entire villages, burying families under tonnes of liquefied earth, smashing key hydroelectric power projects and highways that are vital for the national economy. As the immediate search transitions into the quiet despair of displacement, an uncomfortable truth emerges: Humanitarian charity is a deeply inadequate response to a planetary crime.

Disaster response in vulnerable Least Developed Countries such as Nepal has always been discussed in a patronising way of charity for decades. The Minority World offers relief funds and emergency supplies when a mountain collapses, or a glacier bursts. But Nepal does not suffer from a lack of local resilience, nor are its recurring ecological catastrophes mere acts of nature. They are the direct, measurable effects of an overheating planet a crisis created thousands of miles away, in the fossil-fuel-consuming industrial capitals of the developed world.

Nepal is not just in need of sympathy or urgent relief supplies from abroad. The world urgently and rightly requires climate justice, structural reparations and the actualisation of compensation for climate change-induced loss and damage in Nepal. This is a mathematical and moral imbalance. Nepal accounts for only 0.025 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions. It has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world per capita, extensive rural communities subsisting on low-impact diets and its rivers producing hydroelectric power.

However, the country faces frontline effects of climate change despite contributing almost nothing to the carbon loading of the atmosphere.

This fundamental injustice has been expressed multiple times on the international political platform. Former Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal emphasised the moral essence of this crisis on September 21, 2023, during the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, reminding the global leaders that Nepal is bearing a punishment for a crime that it did not commit. He stressed the importance of the Himalayas helping to regulate the earth’s temperature but noted that they are melting at a much faster pace than expected, which is an injustice to Nepal.

Dahal’s words expressed the absurdity of Nepal’s situation; the irony of the innocent being punished. These pristine peaks, serving as natural water towers for close to 1.4 billion people downstream in South Asia, are rapidly degrading. While the ice is melting, the permafrost is thawing, the integrity of the mountain slopes is deteriorating, and people living under those mountains have played no part in burning the responsible fossil fuels.

The latest mudslides are part of a complex and interrelated eco-crisis affecting this nation at all elevations. Alarming glacial lakes such as Tsho Rolpa, Imja and Thulagi are expanding due to the rapid retreat of glaciers in the High Himalayas (above 4,000 m).

Nepal’s limited national budget is repeatedly diverted from healthcare, education and poverty alleviation to emergency recovery as a result of recurrent climate disasters. The losses incurred due to climate-induced disasters in Nepal range up to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and during severe disaster years, it is estimated that as much as 1.5–2 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product is lost. This is the destruction of capital infrastructure that is a crushing economic anchor for a nation making an effort to move away from the status of Least Developed Country.

The moral perversion of the current international financial architecture is that when Nepal’s infrastructure is wiped out by climate shocks, it often relies on multilateral loans from foreign institutions to rebuild. In short, Nepal is compelled to pay interest on foreign loans to repair the damages caused by the carbon emissions of wealthier nations, thus repeating the cycle of budget diversion, national debt growth, and decreased adaptive capacity, and increasing vulnerability to the next extreme climate event. International climate negotiations need to disentangle three areas of operation if they are to secure their future.

First, Emergency Relief offers temporary relief in the form of tents, food and medicine. It is reactive, charity-based, and focuses on immediate survival, providing time for survivors to get through until others can help without restoring livelihoods or replacing lost national assets.

Second, though, adaptation finance provides funds for proactive measures such as drought-resistant crops, early warning systems and embankments, which can help communities prepare for inevitable changes, but even the best adaptation planning cannot withstand an unprecedented cloudburst that causes a mountain wall to collapse.

Third, loss and damage means direct financial support for irreversible, unavoidable losses, including economic losses such as the loss of farmland and infrastructure, as well as non-economic losses such as the loss of life, indigenous heritage and ecosystem collapse.

Nepal’s foreign policy and climate diplomacy must therefore change from a passive call to proactive advocacy in global settings by setting clear and structured demands on the international community.

The international community needs to implement unconditional debt cancellation and Climate Debt Swaps, where externally held debts are discharged in favour of tangible investments in the mountains, forests and disaster management within the country. In this regard, there is a need for support from affluent countries in terms of investment in a transboundary Himalayan risk monitoring mechanism by establishing sophisticated early-warning systems, geological monitoring and satellite systems.

There is a need for robust internal governance in Nepal that will ensure accountability on the global front. Local governments should carry out strict environmental and geological impact assessments, and halt the indiscriminate and unprofessional bulldozing of fragile hill slopes for rural roads, thus greatly aggravating the landslide risk during heavy rains. Each and every tent and tarpaulin distributed within a disaster area is a reflection of human compassion, yet also a sign of a worldwide structural failure.

Compassion sustains a family for a week, and justice provides them with a future. Nepal can no longer tolerate a global arrangement whereby the key emitting countries privatise profits from carbon-based growth while shifting the devastating environmental effects onto the innocent people of the Himalayas. The time has come for the ‘Global North’ to pay its historical ecological debts to Nepal with the reparations it is rightfully owed.