Nepal demands $20m climate compensation as floods kill 6,000, blames wealthy polluters

In late August, a glacier high in the Himalayas fractured and collapsed. The rupture triggered a landslide and unleashed a wall of water that tore through the mountains of Nepal and Chinese-controlled Tibet with almost no warning. Waves reached heights of 60 to 70 feet, moving at speeds near 180 kilometers per hour, carrying debris, mud, stones, and rock. When the water receded, more than 1,300 people were confirmed dead and another 5,500 were missing. After twelve days of rescue operations, hope of finding survivors had largely faded. Entire towns and villages were erased. Highways vanished. Some areas remained cut off from the outside world.

Nepal's foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, described the disaster as something beyond the country's ordinary experience. It was not the monsoon flooding that Nepal knows how to weather. This was, he told the Guardian, like a tsunami descending from the Himalayas—a catastrophe on the scale of the 2015 earthquake that had left much of the nation in ruins. The damage estimates climbed toward $5 billion or higher. More than 20,000 homes would need rebuilding. The main highway required reconstruction. Villages built along vulnerable riverbanks, some of which had been completely washed away, would need to be relocated to higher ground.

Khanal used the moment to make a stark argument about responsibility. Nepal, he pointed out, produces less than 0.1 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the Himalayan mountains that span Nepal, India, China, and Bhutan have been warming at nearly fifty percent faster than the global average. In just over thirty years, the UN reported in 2023, the mountains had lost close to a third of their ice. Scientists believe the climate crisis played a role in the glacier's collapse. The physics were clear: warmer temperatures destabilize ice. Warmer temperatures melt glaciers. Melting glaciers fail.

On behalf of Nepal's ministries of finance and environment, Khanal had written to the UN's loss and damage fund—established in 2022 under the Paris climate agreement—requesting $20 million in climate-related compensation. He was direct about what he saw as the moral weight of the claim. "We have contributed so little to climate change," he said. "It is imperative for those in the global community who benefit from larger, much more polluting economies, and whose historical contribution to greenhouse gases is much bigger than ours, to accept a shared responsibility." He called on the world's biggest economies to "wake up" and recognize that this disaster was not an isolated event but a warning of what the changing Himalayan climate would bring again and again.

Khanal acknowledged that $20 million was "obviously not nearly enough" to cover the actual damage Nepal had sustained. The UN's loss and damage fund itself was already in crisis. It had received requests totaling $2.8 billion from about 119 countries but had received only around $400 million from the international community. The United States, the world's largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, had contributed just $17 million after Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement. The financing gap was vast and widening.

When asked whether he blamed specific countries—India and China, both major emitters and Nepal's neighbors—Khanal initially singled them out but then stepped back. "It is not just about shifting the blame to one or the other country," he said. "It's about us all working together." He reframed the $20 million request as more than a claim for damages. It was, he argued, a wake-up call for the global community to build a more robust mechanism to help vulnerable and small economies like Nepal prepare for and mitigate climate-related risks before the next disaster arrives.

On the question of whether China had failed to warn Nepal or share data about the glacier's fragility, Khanal was measured. With hindsight, he acknowledged, it was clear the glacier had been receding for six months before it collapsed. But neither Nepal nor Chinese scientists had predicted the imminent failure. "I do not believe any of us had any idea of the threat until it happened," he said. He was in discussion with China about improving coordination and data sharing for the Himalayan region going forward. When pressed on the political obstacles to securing climate compensation, Khanal was blunt: "Yes there always will be people who may not agree to our perspective or deny there is climate change, but there are also people who deny that the Earth is round."