After the Bhotekoshi flood, loss and damage has become something of a refrain for every segment of Nepali society. Cabinet ministers and parliamentarians have used it on international platforms and in parliament, experts and columnists have explained how the fund works, and the Prime Minister is about to carry it to New York for the UN General Assembly. It deserves the attention. But there is a risk hiding inside the phrase. A country can become so absorbed in the fund that it loses the agenda the fund was meant to serve. Nepal has done this before, after every climatic disaster of the past two decades, and the Bhotekoshi flash flood gives us one more chance not to.
A habit of reacting
Long before anyone in Kathmandu had heard of a loss and damage fund, Nepal had already settled into a way of responding to disaster. The Koshi broke its embankment in 2008 and displaced tens of thousands in Sunsari and across the border in Bihar. We rebuilt the embankment and moved on. The Seti tore through Kaski in 2012 after a rock and ice collapse on Annapurna IV, killing dozens of people who had no warning. We called it a freak and moved on. Melamchi in 2021 buried the country’s largest drinking water project under sediment and took the Helambu valley’s markets with it. We patched the intake and moved on. Thame in 2024 emptied two glacial lakes above a Sherpa village that had lived under them for generations. We monitored a few more lakes and moved on.
It would be wrong to read all of these as climate events, and wrong to attach a compensation claim to each of them in hindsight. The science was thinner then, the fund did not exist, and some of what happened on the Koshi had more to do with an embankment than with a warming atmosphere. What connects them is not their cause. It is our response. Each time we treated the disaster as an accident rather than as a condition, something that had happened to us rather than something we were now living inside. The response was competent in its way and reactionary in its nature. A relief package, a reconstruction committee, some public discourse about the future of the Himalayan region, and a study report or two.
What never followed was a change in how we build, where we settle, how we govern rivers and glacial lakes, or how we argue our case abroad. That is the habit, and it is the habit that matters now, because the climate has made accidents into a pattern and we are still answering them one at a time. Bhotekoshi and its massive destruction is the price of that habit. Over 1350 people are confirmed dead and close to 5,000 are missing. When the full assessment is done it will count homes, public and private buildings, bridges, hydropower plants, farmland, forests, and a generation of grief in Rasuwa, Nuwakot and across the country that no fund will repay. This is not one more entry on the list. It is the event that should end the list.
The fund is a means, not the agenda
Nepal has written to the Loss and Damage Fund. The foreign minister has said the country is moving from asking for aid to demanding justice, and the environment minister has told the least developed countries that Nepal cannot keep paying for the mistakes of others. All of this is right. But the fund has no fast track and its board decides on its own timetable. The moral case is strong, yet the scientific work of establishing what role a warming climate played in this particular glacier collapse has barely begun, and that evidence is what turns a moral claim into a payable one. If Nepal treats the fund as the whole of its climate policy, it will spend the next year waiting on a decision made in a room among many countries, and the reconstruction will proceed as every reconstruction before it did.
The better reading is that the Bhotekoshi flash flood is an ample opportunity to act on the climate agenda itself, at three levels at once, and to use the fund as one instrument among several.
Globally, negotiate rather than speak
The Prime Minister’s decision to attend the upcoming UN General Assembly is a welcome move, and one that has been widely appreciated at home. High level presence internationalizes an issue and opens space for coalitions with countries in the same position. But the Assembly itself is a weak decision maker. Its resolutions do not bind, and power still sits in the Security Council. What a country gets out of New York is decided in the bilateral meetings, the side events and the quiet conversations that run for months before and after the speeches. Nepal should treat the week as a negotiation with clear targets, not as an occasion for a long and moving address.
That means a speech built around two or three concrete tasks rather than a survey of every grievance. Climate finance and justice, the specific vulnerability of mountain and landlocked countries, and rapid access to loss and damage support would be enough. It means Nepal’s permanent mission in New York fixing the bilateral schedule with countries such as India, China, the United States and the European states before the Prime Minister lands. It means working through the blocs where Nepal has weight, the least developed countries, the mountain countries and the landlocked group, so that our case is theirs as well. And it means that when the delegation comes home, the ministries follow up on every commitment and the mission keeps the issue alive in the committee sessions that run until December. Commitments made at the Assembly stay commitments unless someone keeps working after the cameras leave.
Should Nepal lobby the big emitters directly? Yes, but not alone and not as a claimant. A bilateral demand for compensation from India or China will be politely received and quietly shelved. The same demand, carried by nearly forty least developed countries into the negotiations before COP31, is harder to ignore. Nepal’s advantage is that it has the most vivid recent case. Its weakness is that it has never sustained a diplomatic effort on climate for longer than a news cycle.
Nationally, choose what kind of growth
Nepal has set itself the ambition of a hundred billion dollar economy within the next decade or so. It is worth asking, without cynicism, whether that ambition and the Bhotekoshi valley can coexist. The road to the water’s edge, the hydropower cascade, the customs yard on the floodplain, and the concrete hotels where low cost stone and timber houses once stood above the flood line, all of these were growth. The flood removed a tenth of the country’s generating capacity in a morning. Growth that the river can take back is not growth. A green economy is not a slogan for donors. It is the practical recognition that in this landscape the only development that lasts is development that can survive the river it is built beside.
That recognition has to be written into law. Settlement policy that keeps people off the floodplain and is actually enforced. A building code that remembers what a hill house was for. Energy policy that stops treating every snow fed river as a site. A dedicated institution for climate change with authority and budget, in place of the fragments now scattered across ministries. And a political commitment that outlasts one government, owned across parties in the way Nepal’s peace process once was.
Locally, rebuild differently
Can Bhotekoshi be a model of rehabilitation and reconstruction? It can, but only if the government does three things it has never done. Publish the damage and relief lists at ward level so that recovery is argued over facts. Put the municipalities of Rasuwa and Nuwakot at the centre of decisions on where people rebuild and which settlements are relocated to safer ground, because that is where the lists are made and where trust is won or lost. And ask the affected communities, before the plans are drawn, what they need. They were hit differently and they will recover differently, and a reconstruction that treats them all the same will reproduce the inequality the flood exposed.
Who carries this
A government cannot do it alone, and this one should not try. The civil society organizations it has kept outside the one door relief system are the same organizations that perhaps know the valleys. The opposition parties who backed the all party meetings can be held to a climate agenda that survives the next election. The diaspora can press the emitting countries in their own capitals. And the public, which argued furiously over the response, can be asked to argue as hard about the reconstruction.
Can Nepal lead on climate justice globally? It can, but on one condition. The country that asks the world to take its losses seriously must first show that it takes them seriously itself. Loss and damage is the claim. The agenda is everything Nepal does before the claim is paid.
The author is Executive Director of Centre for Social Change, Kathmandu
