Sawt Falasteen - Rich nations should foot climate bill, says Nepal minister

The Himalayan nation suffered one of the worst catastrophes in its history late last month when a tsunami-like flood, triggered by a high-altitude glacial mountain collapse along the Nepal-China border, cut a swathe of destruction.

More than 1,400 people died, 6,000 are still missing, and the economic devastation runs in the billions of dollars.

"What we're trying to convey to the world is this: these issues of climate change are not theoretical anymore," Minister of Foreign Affairs Shisir Khanal said in an interview at Nepal's permanent mission, during the United Nation's high-level week.

"These are becoming real, and the frequency of such disasters are likely to happen more often over the next few years as the temperature rises, as the glaciers melt."

Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) have described the event as a "compound crisis" in which local geological instability combined with long-term warming that has led to glacier retreat and permafrost thaw.

Nepal has contributed negligibly to the breakdown of the global climate system, Khanal added.

More than 90 percent of its electricity comes from hydropower, over 70 percent of new cars sold are electric, and the nation contributes just 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gases.

"So why should we, who have not had any contribution to this issue, only bear the burden?"

- $5 bn disaster cost -

Khanal said his meetings in New York had been productive, with the United States announcing $31 million in new flood recovery support.

The G7 informally promised support at a meeting on Wednesday, he said, and Britain has also vowed to help.

Still, the scale of the challenges is enormous: preliminary estimates by his government put the cost of the disaster at $5 billion.

Nepal has asked the UN's Loss and Damage fund for $20 million, the maximum allowed, but a tiny fraction of what it needs.

The fund, established in 2022 in the aftermath of catastrophic floods in Pakistan, has yet to make even its first disbursement and is dramatically underfunded -- and observers see Nepal as a key test.

Khanal said, however, he had been encouraged by cash assistance and rescue teams sent by Nepal's neighbors, as well as the Nepalese diaspora who had sent money directly to the Prime Minister's Relief Fund.

Previously, he said, Nepalis preferred to donate to international organizations and local nonprofits -- but that has changed since the election of new Prime Minister Balendra Shah, a former rapper who won power on the back of a youth-led movement.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official under Joe Biden, has criticized President Donald Trump's administration for sweeping aid cuts to Nepal after it took office, including for flood prediction and glacier inventories.

"There's no early warning system that probably exists in the world right now to imagine a compounded disaster of that nature," Khanal said. "But obviously what USAID and other institutions used to provide us is financial and technical assistance."

Nepal now needs more such assistance from the world to develop more complex systems involving satellites to monitor the rate of glacial melt and provide advance warnings, he said.

Q.Najjar--SF-PST