When Prime Minister Balen Shah steps onto the green-marble rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 24 September, the devastation left by the August floods will still be fresh in Nepal’s collective memory.
On 24 August, catastrophic floods caused by a glacier shearing off in Langtang-Lirung swept through river corridors, destroyed critical hydropower infrastructure, and buried hillside settlements under torrents of mud and debris. It would be easy to describe the disaster as another tragic episode in a country accustomed to monsoon extremes. But that would miss the bigger picture.
Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is increasingly exposed to some of the most destructive consequences of a warming planet. The country is not simply experiencing bad weather. It is standing on the front line of a global climate crisis it did little to create.
That is the message Shah will need to take to New York. But making the world listen will be far harder than describing Nepal’s suffering.
The diplomatic environment he will enter is deeply divided. Geopolitical competition is intensifying, climate scepticism has returned to the White House under President Donald Trump, and Nepal sits between two major powers—India and China—that remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
In such an environment, an appeal based solely on moral responsibility is unlikely to go very far. If Nepal wants the world to pay attention, Shah will need to move beyond the language of victimhood and present a case based on science, economics, security and shared self-interest. That means changing the way Nepal tells its climate story.
The biggest challenge may come from Washington. With Donald Trump back in the White House, the language of international climate cooperation has become much harder to sell in traditional terms. An argument centred on the historical responsibility of wealthy Western countries may be morally compelling. Still, it is unlikely to persuade an administration that approaches foreign policy primarily through national interest, economic leverage and risk management.
For that reason, Shah should avoid presenting Nepal simply as a victim asking wealthy countries to pay for their past emissions. Instead, he should explain why what happens in the Himalayas matters to everyone else.
Research on climate-related security risks has increasingly shown that environmental disruption can become a multiplier of existing economic and geopolitical vulnerabilities. The breakdown of mountain ecosystems can disrupt supply chains, place pressure on migration systems and threaten transport and energy infrastructure far beyond the mountains themselves. The catastrophic flood offers a powerful illustration of that risk.
The consequences are not confined to Nepal. They can affect investors, energy markets, regional trade and neighbouring economies. That changes the argument for climate finance.
Nepal should not ask the world to finance its recovery simply because it is a poor country suffering from climate change. It should argue that investing in Nepal’s resilience is a form of risk management—an investment that protects infrastructure, reduces future economic losses and helps prevent instability across South Asia. That is a language even governments sceptical of climate politics can understand.
Nepal must also handle its relationship with India and China carefully. Geography leaves Kathmandu little room for diplomatic confrontation. India is indispensable to Nepal’s access to transit, fuel and regional markets. China is an increasingly important partner in connectivity, investment and strategic diversification.
Both countries are also major emitters because of their dependence on fossil fuels and energy-intensive industrial development. But publicly lecturing either Beijing or New Delhi about their emissions would achieve little. It could instead damage the very relationships Nepal needs to protect.
The smarter approach is to make an argument that includes both without directly blaming either. The Himalayas should be presented not as Nepal’s private environmental problem, but as a shared regional asset.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya is often described as the “Third Pole” because it contains the largest concentration of frozen water outside the polar regions. The region’s glaciers are retreating rapidly, with profound implications for water security downstream. According to the 2023 HI-WISE assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the changes taking place in the region threaten the water security of roughly two billion people.
The rivers originating in Nepal’s mountains do not recognise national boundaries. They flow south into India and sustain agriculture, ecosystems and communities across the Gangetic plains.
This is where Shah can turn Nepal’s vulnerability into diplomatic leverage. The atmospheric changes causing the melt of the cryosphere or producing increasingly extreme rainfall in the Himalayan region are not simply a Nepali problem. They threaten the stability of the entire regional water system.
The basic science is straightforward. Under the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, the atmosphere can hold roughly seven percent more moisture for every one-degree Celsius increase in temperature. In the steep and complex geography of the Himalayas, that additional moisture can contribute to more intense rainfall, cloudbursts and other extreme events.
The consequences could be enormous: greater flood risks, unpredictable water flows, damage to agriculture, disruption of hydropower generation and more frequent glacial lake outburst floods.
In other words, Nepal should not stand before the UN as a weak country asking powerful countries for sympathy. It should speak as an upstream country warning its downstream neighbours about a threat that will eventually reach them.
Nepal also needs to rethink the language of climate justice. For decades, developing countries have invoked the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”—the idea that countries that contributed most to the climate crisis should bear a greater share of the burden of addressing it.
The principle remains morally powerful. But moral arguments alone have not produced enough money.
Climate finance has too often arrived slowly, in fragmented pledges, limited bilateral programmes or loans that leave vulnerable countries with more debt after disasters they did not cause.
The creation and operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund has been an important step, but the resources available remain tiny compared with the scale of climate-related destruction across the developing world.
Shah should therefore bring numbers to the UN podium. He should compare the actual cost of rebuilding Nepal’s destroyed bridges, roads, hydropower facilities and settlements (around US$ 5 billion) with the scale and speed of international climate financing.
The point should be simple: some climate disasters cannot realistically be prevented through adaptation alone. No municipal zoning regulation, retaining wall or drainage project can guarantee safety when rainfall reaches levels far beyond historical experience. There are circumstances in which the physical limits of adaptation are reached. What follows is not simply an adaptation deficit but genuine loss and damage.
Nepal should therefore push for climate financing for such destruction to take the form of automatic, non-debt-creating transfers. A country whose infrastructure has been destroyed by a climate system it contributed almost nothing to should not have to borrow money at commercial or even concessional rates simply to rebuild what it has lost.
If the money arrives as debt, climate vulnerability can become a cycle: disaster destroys infrastructure, borrowing pays for reconstruction, debt reduces fiscal space, and the next disaster arrives before the country has recovered.
That is not a sustainable model of climate finance. It is a second penalty imposed on the countries already paying the highest price.
There is another way for Nepal to strengthen its case. The country should stop presenting itself only as a recipient of international assistance and start emphasising what it contributes to the wider world.
Nearly 45 percent of Nepal’s land is under forest cover. Its forests, watersheds and mountain ecosystems provide environmental services that extend far beyond its borders. They absorb carbon, regulate water systems and help maintain the ecological stability of the region. Yet much of this contribution remains economically invisible.
This is where the concept of Payment for Ecosystem Services could become important. If Nepal and other mountain countries are providing environmental services that benefit hundreds of millions of people elsewhere, there is a strong case for developing international mechanisms to compensate them for maintaining those services. The idea would fundamentally change Nepal’s position.
Rather than appearing at international forums as a country asking for aid, Nepal could present itself as an ecological creditor—a country that has preserved forests, watersheds and mountain ecosystems whose benefits are enjoyed by the wider region and the world. The principle is straightforward: those who benefit from an ecosystem should contribute to maintaining it.
Such a framework could also encourage international financial institutions to develop new instruments that reward countries for protecting carbon sinks and watersheds without forcing them to take on additional debt.
Finally, the effectiveness of Nepal’s message will depend on how Shah delivers it. One advantage he possesses is his identity as an engineer. Unlike many traditional political leaders, he can credibly speak about infrastructure, physical thresholds, hydrology, structural resilience and systemic risk. He should use that credibility.
The world has heard countless speeches about saving the planet. General appeals about the need for urgent climate action can easily disappear into the enormous archive of UN rhetoric. Numbers are harder to ignore.
Shah should put precise figures before the General Assembly: the number of bridges and hydropower facilities destroyed on 24 August, the economic cost of reconstruction, the share of national GDP at risk and the potential consequences for downstream populations. He should explain what happens when a Himalayan water system becomes increasingly unpredictable.
And he should make clear that Nepal is not asking the international community to rescue it from an unfortunate natural disaster. It is warning that the physical systems supporting South Asia’s economy and population are becoming less stable. That is a very different message.
Shah’s UN address should therefore not become an emotional eulogy for those who died or another desperate appeal for international generosity. Emotion has its place. Nepal has every right to speak about the human suffering caused by the floods. But emotion alone will not change the calculations of powerful governments. The stronger argument is one of shared self-interest.
Nepal can tell the world that the Himalayas are not simply a spectacular mountain range located in a small developing country. They are a critical component of Asia’s water, energy and ecological systems.
If mountain hydrology becomes increasingly unstable, the consequences will move downstream—to farms, cities, power plants, industries and markets.
That is why Nepal’s climate crisis should be understood as a regional security issue as much as an environmental one. Shah’s challenge, then, is to change the terms of the conversation.
He must move Nepal’s climate diplomacy away from a familiar narrative of helplessness and toward one of risk, responsibility and value. He must show that protecting Nepal’s mountains is not charity, but an investment in regional stability; that rebuilding destroyed infrastructure is not simply development assistance, but disaster-risk management; and that protecting Nepal’s forests and watersheds is not merely a domestic environmental policy, but a service with regional and global value.
If he succeeds, Nepal will no longer be asking an indifferent world to care because Nepal is suffering. It will be asking the world to care because the consequences of ignoring Nepal will eventually reach everyone. And that may be the most powerful argument a small Himalayan country can make at the United Nations.
This article was first published on Clickmandu.