When Nepal asks the world to pay up, whose bill is it?
Nepal's Prime Minister Balendra Shah made his first foreign trip six months into office when he led a delegation to the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. His purpose was to ask wealthy nations with high emissions what they owe Nepal after flash floods killed more than 1,450 people and left nearly 6,000 missing.
The floods struck on Aug. 26, when a mass of water, mud and ice broke loose near the Nepal-China border and tore through villages and infrastructure. Nepal observed a national day of mourning 13 days later. China has reported 43 dead and more than 500 missing on its side of the border. Rescue crews have pulled survivors from the wreckage, including a man freed from a tunnel at a hydropower plant and a 64-year-old woman recovered from the top floor of a mud-buried building.
India has been drawn into the disaster on several fronts. Nepali police list many Indian nationals among the missing — the largest foreign contingent — and floodwaters are reported to have carried some victims' bodies roughly 240 kilometers downstream into Indian territory. Indian rescue teams have worked alongside Chinese and Korean units at damaged hydropower sites in Rasuwa district, including the Trishuli 3A and 3B projects.
Nepal's finance ministry has already written to the U.N.'s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage seeking emergency assistance, treating the request as an exception since the fund's board doesn't ordinarily weigh losses of this scale on its December agenda. The ministry has also pointed out that Nepal accounts for roughly 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions yet is absorbing damage on a scale far out of proportion to that share.
The fund itself was built for exactly this kind of appeal, but it is nowhere near able to meet it. Pledges since its creation total about $768 million, and the board has approved only a $250 million pilot package to cover claims through 2026, with individual grants capped at $20 million. Independent estimates put the annual cost of climate-driven loss and damage in developing countries at $400 billion to $580 billion by decade's end. The fund holds well under a tenth of one percent of what is actually needed in a given year — and Washington's withdrawal of its own $17.5 million pledge earlier this year has done nothing to reassure other donors.
Korea has more than a passing stake in how this plays out. Korean personnel took part in the Rasuwa rescue effort alongside Indian and Chinese teams, and Seoul has positioned itself as a middle-power voice on climate finance with pledges to the Green Climate Fund and taking part in loss-and-damage negotiations as a donor rather than a claimant. Nepal's situation is a preview of the bill developed economies will keep receiving as glacial and monsoon disasters intensify across Asia. Korea's own response will say something about whether its climate diplomacy amounts to more than pledges made at conferences and left unfunded afterward.
Nepal's government bears some responsibility of its own. The hydropower plants were built in the path of volatile glacial rivers without adequate early-warning systems, and Kathmandu is already facing questions about whether disaster preparedness kept pace with its infrastructure ambitions. But domestic planning failures don't resolve the separate question of what nations responsible for the overwhelming share of global emissions owe the communities now living with the physical loss.
Governments agreed to create the Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 in 2022, after floods submerged nearly a third of Pakistan and killed more than 1,700 people. It didn't become operational until COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, two years later, and its first call for disbursements opened only in December 2025. New York will now decide whether Nepal's request stretches that machinery to fit or simply confirms how badly it was undersized from the start.
Brabim Karki is a businessman and writer based in Nepal. The views here are his own.