The flood that tore through Nepal on August 26 raises a question larger than the disaster itself: who pays when a crisis created globally arrives first in places that contributed little to creating it?
It was a warm Wednesday morning in Nepal. After weeks of rain, the sun had finally broken through, bright over the mountains. Along the northern frontier, pilgrims and travellers were moving through the Himalaya—some returning from the sacred journey to Kailash Manasarovar, others travelling towards Gosaikunda for Janai Purnima. In towns and villages below, people were beginning another ordinary day. Shops were opening, meals were being prepared, people were going to work, children were being cared for, and families were making plans for the days ahead. There was nothing in that morning to suggest that within hours, the landscape itself would become a threat.
Then the mountain moved. An ice and rock collapse near the Nepal–China border sent a massive surge of water and debris downstream. The precise sequence of events is still being investigated, but the human consequences are already painfully clear. Homes, roads, bridges and livelihoods were destroyed. People were killed and left missing. For those who survived, the disaster did not end when the water receded. A destroyed bridge can mean an inaccessible hospital. A buried road can cut a community off from food and medicine. A damaged home can mean months of displacement. A lost livelihood can become debt. Behind every casualty figure is a person, a family, a home and a future. This is where the phrase “loss and damage” becomes human.
But before we ask who should pay for what was lost, there is a more uncomfortable question: What was Nepal’s fault?
Nepal is not without responsibility. We must examine where we build roads, how we plan settlements, how we design infrastructure, how seriously we invest in early warning systems, and whether our institutions are prepared for complex hazards. Poor planning, unsafe construction and inadequate preparedness can turn a hazard into a catastrophe. We must be accountable for the risks we can control. But our responsibility for managing risk should not be confused with responsibility for creating global warming.
Nepal has contributed very little to the accumulation of greenhouse gases compared with countries that industrialized over generations through fossil fuel use. Yet its people are living beneath a rapidly changing Himalaya. So perhaps the question is not simply why the mountain moved. Perhaps it is why countries that contributed so little to changing the climate are increasingly being asked to pay the price of living with its consequences.
It is not my fault!
The Himalaya has always been dangerous. Floods, landslides, avalanches and earthquakes are not new. What is changing is the environment in which these hazards occur. The Himalaya is warming. Glaciers are retreating and losing ice. Snow and ice conditions are shifting, while changes in rainfall and frozen ground interact with unstable mountain terrain. None of this means that climate change caused the disaster of August 26. The science is still developing, and it would be irresponsible to make such a simple claim. But climate change does not have to be the immediate trigger of every disaster to matter. It can change the conditions in which hazards unfold.
A glacier can become unstable. Heavy rainfall can trigger a landslide. A landslide can block a river. That blockage can fail and send water, rock and sediment downstream. One hazard can become another. For Nepal, this means preparing not only for individual hazards, but also for connected hazards unfolding across a changing mountain system. This is where the idea of disaster risk becomes important.
A glacier can collapse without killing anyone. A river can rise without destroying a community. A hazard becomes a disaster when it meets people, infrastructure and systems that are exposed and vulnerable. Nepal’s geography makes this particularly difficult. Roads follow rivers. Communities sit in steep valleys. Tourism, pilgrimage and hydropower are deeply connected to mountain landscapes. Development has brought opportunity, but it has also increased exposure.
A bridge is not simply a bridge. For a remote community, it may be the only route to a hospital or market. A road is not simply a road. When it disappears, access to food, medicine and emergency care can disappear with it. Vulnerability is also never shared equally. A family with savings, transport and access to information has options that a poor family in an isolated settlement may not. A healthy adult may evacuate quickly. A child, an older person or a person with a disability may not. The flood may be the same, but the ability to survive it is not.
This is why the climate crisis is also a public health crisis. We often measure disasters through houses destroyed, bridges washed away and money lost. Public health asks another question: What happens to the person who needed that road to reach a hospital? For an injured person, a destroyed bridge can mean delayed treatment. For a pregnant woman needing emergency care, an inaccessible road can become life-threatening. For a child who depends on medicine, a broken supply route can become another emergency. Floods can contaminate drinking water, disrupt food and nutrition, interrupt routine healthcare and make disease surveillance more difficult. The psychological consequences of losing homes, livelihoods and loved ones may continue long after the water disappears.
A climate-resilient health system therefore cannot mean simply building stronger hospitals. A hospital cannot be resilient if the road to it is not. The same principle applies to early warning. After a disaster, we often ask whether people were warned. The more important question is whether they were able to act. A warning must be detected, communicated, received, understood and trusted. People then need enough time, information, transport and a safe place to go. Forecasting a hazard is not the same as protecting a community. A message is useless if the network has failed. A siren means little if people do not know what it signals. The best warning cannot save someone who has nowhere safe to evacuate.
This is why preparedness must begin before the warning. Communities need evacuation plans. Local governments need resources. Health facilities need emergency supplies and backup systems. Rescue teams need equipment. People who face greater barriers to evacuation need support. This is the logic of anticipatory action: act before disaster rather than waiting for disaster to prove the forecast correct.
But preparedness requires money. And that brings us to the question beneath climate justice: Who pays for resilience? Nepal needs glacier monitoring, better weather and river observation, stronger early warning systems, safer roads and bridges, resilient health facilities, protected water systems and capable local governments. These investments are almost invisible when they succeed. A bridge that does not collapse does not make the news. A community evacuated safely does not become a statistic. Yet prevention is exactly what adaptation should achieve.
Climate finance should therefore mean more than money arriving after disaster. Mitigation finance helps reduce emissions. Adaptation finance helps countries prepare for climate impacts. Loss and damage addresses losses that cannot be fully avoided through adaptation. For Nepal, these are not abstract international terms. Adaptation finance could help monitor dangerous glaciers, strengthen early warning systems, build safer infrastructure, protect health facilities and give local governments the resources to act before a crisis becomes irreversible. Loss and damage matters when even the best preparation cannot prevent destruction.
For a family that has lost its home, loss and damage is not diplomatic language. It is the place where the house once stood. For a country repeatedly forced to spend scarce resources rebuilding what disasters destroy, it can become a cycle of damage, debt and reconstruction. Climate finance should help break that cycle.
But Nepal must also look inward. Climate justice does not mean absolving ourselves of responsibility. We must ask whether roads are being built safely, whether settlements are expanding into dangerous areas, whether infrastructure is designed for future risks and whether local governments have the capacity to respond. We cannot blame every destroyed road on climate change. We cannot call every poorly planned settlement a climate victim. We must be accountable for the risks we can control. But we should not be expected to carry alone the financial burden of a changing climate that Nepal did little to create. That is the difficult balance at the heart of climate justice.
Perhaps we should also reconsider the phrase “natural disaster.” The glacier may be natural. The river may be natural. The mountain may be natural. But the scale of a disaster is shaped by society: where people live, where roads are built, how bridges are designed, whether warnings reach communities and whether hospitals remain accessible.
So what should resilience mean now? It should mean that a mountain can move without an entire community being destroyed. It should mean that a warning arrives before the water and that people have the means to act. It should mean that a damaged bridge does not cut off a community from healthcare. It should mean that local governments have resources before a disaster, not only promises afterwards.
Nepal must build more carefully, plan more wisely, strengthen its institutions and prepare for a changing Himalaya. But resilience cannot be Nepal’s responsibility alone. A country that contributed little to the accumulation of global greenhouse gases should not have to choose between development and adaptation, between rebuilding what was destroyed and preparing for what may come next.
The Himalaya is changing. The climate is changing. The risks are changing. Our definition of resilience must change with them.
So, what was Nepal’s fault? Perhaps some of the roads we built. Some of the places we built them. Some of the risks we ignored. Some of the warnings we failed to act on. But not the warming of a planet shaped by generations of emissions far beyond our borders. That distinction is not an excuse—it is the beginning of climate justice.
Nepal must take responsibility for the risks it can control, but should it also have to bear the cost of a changing climate it did so little to create? When the next mountain moves, the next flood arrives, or the next community is cut off from a hospital, the question should not be asked only of Nepal’s preparedness. It must also be asked of the world’s responsibility. Climate justice demands that resilience be shared, that those who contributed most to the crisis help those who contributed least to survive it.
