Nepal is demanding “climate justice” and $20m in compensation after the recent devastating floods in the country and China’s Tibet region, which led to the deaths and disappearances of thousands of people. The catastrophe, which scientists say was caused by the effects of climate change, was triggered when part of a mountain glacier collapsed and a torrent of water and mud flooded down into Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot regions, as well as into China’s Tibet region on August 26. More than 1,300 people have been confirmed dead and more than 5,000 remain missing.
On Monday, the country’s President Ramchandra Paudel made a similar demand during an address to the nation. Nepal’s Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment have written a joint letter to the United Nations, which set up a fund to respond to loss and damage caused by climate change in 2022 in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, with a request for $20m in damages. The UN’s Loss and Damage Fund is, however, facing a $2.8bn funding gap as it prepares to approve its first climate recovery projects.
Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and generates most of its electricity from renewable sources of energy. Yet its geographical location in the Himalayas makes it particularly vulnerable to severe climate and weather events. Last month’s catastrophic flooding in the country comes against a backdrop of rapid global warming and glacial loss across the Himalayas.
Glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain range – which spans Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan – lost ice 65 percent faster between 2011 and 2020 than during the previous decade. Nepal’s glaciers, which are sandwiched between two major carbon emitters – India and China – have lost close to one-third of their ice volume in roughly three decades due to global warming, the United Nations said in 2023. Tanuja Pandey, a Nepal-based climate activist and lawyer, said there is collective frustration behind Nepal’s demand for climate justice.
It is deeply painful to people here that global attention intensifies when headlines report thousands of people dead or missing and in the end, their suffering does not generate any urgency to fight climate change,” she told Al Jazeera. Shreya KC, a 28-year-old Nepali climate activist, said there is profound anger and sadness among people in Nepal who say that they must no longer continue to suffer the impact of climate change, which, as they see it, other countries are responsible for. After the glacial collapse happened two weeks ago, people in my region have realised that this can now happen anywhere in Nepal since the Himalayas are warming and glaciers are melting faster.” While Nepal has been actively fighting climate change, Shreya KC said she herself has been involved in projects in the country that focus on clean hydropower generation, forestry and other such climate advocacy programmes.
So people want justice.” According to preliminary estimates from Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, the country’s property, housing and infrastructure losses in the floods amount to some $2.56bn. But claiming compensation under a notion of “climate justice” won’t be straightforward, according to Joyeeta Gupta, a professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam. According to the United Nations, “‘climate justice’ is the moral and ethical principle that seeks to address the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable communities and future generations”.
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