Nepal’s Prime Minister (PM) Balendra Shah is traveling to New Year leading the small delegation to attend the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly and seek climate justice for Nepal and global support following the devastating flash floods in the Nepal-China border. The death toll from the catastrophic floods exceeded 1,200, according to the disaster agency of Nepal. Nearly 5,000 people were missing in Nepal, along with more than 500 in Tibet.
The floods that prompted this trip struck on August 26, when a giant torrent of water, mud, and ice swept away villages, engulfed people and damaged roads and infrastructure in the tranquil Himalayan valley near the Nepal-China border. According to the estimates, more than 1.6 million people affected across five districts in Earlier, foreign minister Shisir Khanal was set to lead the delegation for the UN General Assembly, but in the wake of catastrophic flash floods, the decision changed and the PM is leading the delegates.
Nepal’s finance ministry has already written to the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, requesting for emergency financial assistance to cope with the catastrophic floods. This is sent as a special request as since the fund’s board does not have losses of this scale on its regular December agenda. It also argues that Nepal is facing enormous losses despite contributing very little to global global carbon emissions.
Nepal contributes a mere 0.1% of total global greenhouse-gas emissions. The question Nepal is asking to the General Assembly is whether the countries that did the emitting bear any obligation to the countries absorbing the consequences. Those nations who have contributed the least are suffering the most.
{{/usCountry}}Nepal contributes a mere 0.1% of total global greenhouse-gas emissions. The question Nepal is asking to the General Assembly is whether the countries that did the emitting bear any obligation to the countries absorbing the consequences. Those nations who have contributed the least are suffering the most.
{{/usCountry}}Scientists broadly agree that the Himalayas are warming and losing ice at a rate far exceeding the global average, sharpening the risk of the catastrophic slope failures that recently devastated different places in Nepal. The Himalayan nation is not invoking a vague link between the climate crisis and local misfortune. Instead, it is pointing to a documented physical trend and a disaster that the trend made measurably more likely.
The Loss and Damage Fund was established to support particularly developing nations deal with losses and damage caused due to the climate change. But the program lacks money because the US and others have been reluctant to contribute.
The numbers behind that reluctance are stark. Pledges to the fund have totalled roughly $768 million since its creation, and the board has so far approved only a $250 million pilot package to cover requests through 2026, with individual grants capped at $20 million. Independent estimates put the annual cost of loss and damage in developing countries at somewhere between $400 billion and $580 billion by the end of the decade, rising toward $1 trillion a year once non-economic losses are counted. The fund, in other words, holds well under a tenth of one percent of what is actually needed in a given year. Washington’s position has not helped: The US withdrew its own pledge of $17.5 million earlier this year, a retreat that other wealthy donors have watched with some interest.
Nepal’s own government is also hardly blameless. Hydropower plants were built directly in the path of volatile glacial rivers without adequate early-warning systems. In Kathmandu, questions are already surfacing over whether disaster preparedness kept pace with the country’s aggressive infrastructure boom. Critics will argue that Nepal is asking foreign capitals to underwrite its own planning failures. Yet domestic mismanagement does not erase the underlying moral calculus. The question is not whether Nepal is faultless, but whether the nations responsible for the overwhelming share of global emissions owe anything to the communities now living with the devastating physical loss and damage.
None of this guarantees that Nepal will secure the funding it seeks. Loss and damage finance remains chronically depleted, and the wealthy nations Balendra Shah will address have spent three decades treating climate compensation as a line item to be minimised rather than an obligation to be met. Shah’s mission to New York is a trial of whether the global loss and damage framework, forged in the wake of Pakistan’s 2022 floods and Nepal’s own 2024 glacial lake outbursts can survive a real-time crisis.
The fund itself is barely three years old, and its machinery was not built for a request of this size. Governments agreed to create it at COP27 in 2022, after floods that submerged nearly a third of Pakistan and killed more than 1,700 people. It did not become operational until COP29 in Baku two years later, and its first call for disbursements only opened in December 2025, structured around grants meant for discrete pilot projects rather than a single event with a death toll in the thousands. Whether Nepal’s request forces the fund to stretch beyond that design, or simply exposes how far short it still falls, may be the clearer test of the two.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Brabim Karki, columnist and commentator, Nepal.