- Nepal has approached the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage for quick relief following the August 26 floods.
- Himalayan warming is accelerating, but experts say this specific flood can’t yet be conclusively linked to climate change alone.
- The global climate fund’s resources are insufficient to meet global demand as well as Nepal’s losses, and it’s unclear if the fund can respond quickly enough when there is a crisis.
More than 1,386 people have died and over 5,130 more missing, as of September 12, following the August 26 floods in Nepal. In the wreckage along the Bhote Koshi river lie two unresolved questions: Is climate change linked to the disaster? And, can a nascent global fund, built to help vulnerable countries in such crises, actually deliver?
Soon after the floods, the Government of Nepal wrote a letter to the Board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), a financial mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established in 2022 to help vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters.
In the letter signed by the country’s Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle and Minister for Agriculture, Forest and Environment Gita Chaudhary, Nepal requested the board to take a special decision to respond rapidly, directly and effectively. Signed on August 31, the letter emphasised that a prompt response would “demonstrate that the Fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed.”
Nepal contributes roughly 0.027% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The mountainous country is in the ‘least developed country’ category designated by the UN and is a highly climate-vulnerable country that “continues to bear disproportionate and escalating climate impacts,” the letter states. It argues that the Bhote Koshi disaster demonstrates how extreme events in the cryosphere can rapidly cascade and compound from high mountains to densely populated downstream areas, affecting water, food, energy, health, infrastructure and ecosystems.
Though the letter puts no figure on it, Nepal’s direct damage from this single event is estimated at $2.6 billion, according to Sravan Shrestha, a remote sensing and geoinformation specialist with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD)’s Cryosphere and Water Risks programme. Reconstruction and recovery could cost $4-5 billion or more, he says.
The attribution tension
On the morning of August 26, a bedrock slope underneath a hanging glacier failed at roughly 5,200 metres on the north face of the Langtang Himal. The mass fell about 1,200 metres from the avalanche source, leading to a rock-ice avalanche, and then headed towards the Lhende Khola at about 2,900 metres, a tributary of the Bhote Koshi. Friction from the fall melted ice and generated enough water to turn the avalanche into a debris flow, releasing a hyper-concentrated surge downstream into already swollen rivers, according to the ICIMOD assessment.
Within a few hours, it had turned into the disaster that killed more than a thousand people, with many families still awaiting news of their loved ones. However, it is still unclear whether this crisis was a result of climate change, and how will this shape FRLD’s decision to aid Nepal.
“Not all of the devastating impacts of the Nepal-Tibet floods are due to climate change,” cautions Emily Wilkinson, a Principal Research Fellow in ODI’s Global Risks and Resilience Programme. Warming temperatures likely worsened the flooding’s extent, but how badly households were hit also came down to uneven development, weak investment in disaster risk reduction, social marginalisation in some cases, and geopolitical factors, she says. Attributable loss and damage can be calculated once a climate attribution study is available, adds Wilkinson, who works with a UK-based think tank.
Shrestha, from ICIMOD, says, climate change may be one of the major factors, but confirming that requires further investigation. What isn’t in doubt, is the broader trend: the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) is warming at roughly twice the global average at 0.3°C per decade, with glacier mass projected to shrink dramatically by 2100. A comprehensive 2026 glacier assessment, based on 30 years of Landsat data, shows the region has lost 12% of its glacier area since 1990, with the rate of loss 50% higher in the last decade than in the 1990s. As glaciers retreat, they progressively remove the support once holding the bedrock beneath them in place, he says.
“However, whether it caused that particular slope to collapse on that particular morning is a question nobody has answered, and it is early to claim otherwise,” he says.
“In the 2000s, we expected a glacial-origin flood in the HKH roughly once every 5 to 10 years. In 2025 alone, three such events hit the region, and now this in 2026,” he adds.
Raju Pandit Chhetri, Executive Director of Kathmandu-based non-profit Prakriti Resource Centre, points to three lines of evidence: global warming trends already predict disasters of exactly this kind; the Himalayas are warming faster than the global average due to their fragile mountain ecology; and Nepal itself has seen such events recur systematically, including a glacial lake outburst flood in the Everest region just two years ago. “If they say these are not the kind of events that climate change is going to bring, then those questioning it, whether the FRLD or other developed countries, are just shying away from their own responsibility. They should prove the incident was not because of climate change,” he says.
Experts point to a lack of preparedness that also played a role in worsening heavy damage. Shrestha underlines the biggest gap related to early warning systems. He says that the hazard came from a source nobody was watching. Nepal has a well-developed inventory of 47 potentially dangerous glacial lakes, and early warning systems exist at two of them: Tsho Rolpa and Imja Tsho.
But the August 26 event did not start from a lake, he says. It started from a bedrock slope with a hanging glacier, a source no regional inventory tracks. The monitoring stations that did exist were also too fragile and slow, he adds. Automated river gauges at Bhote Koshi and Syabrubesi were meant to detect rising water and trigger alerts. Instead, the flood swept them away before any warning could be issued. The flood reached Syabrubesi within roughly ten minutes of crossing into Nepal.
The early warning systems that do exist, in any case, are calibrated for gradual monsoon flooding, not a hyper concentrated debris flow in minutes, he says.
The capacity question
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) is an idea that took decades to become reality. Small island nations had pushed for a loss and damage mechanism since at least 1991, during negotiations that led to the UN climate convention which was formally established in 1992. In 2015, Article 8 of the Paris Agreement formally addressed loss and damage as a distinct pillar of climate action. Finally, at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, countries agreed to establish the fund.
The fund was operationalised the following year at COP28 in Dubai, where the summit’s presidency, the United Arab Emirates, pledged $100 million and called on other nations to contribute. Pledges to the fund now exceed $820 million.
As of the fund’s most recent board meeting in July, 119 countries had submitted 176 funding requests of approximately $2.8 billion. The response was significant enough that the board decided it needed additional time for a comprehensive, rigorous assessment of the full portfolio before approving anything. It pushed the decision to its next meeting, scheduled for December 2026 in Manila.
“Even though the FRLD is still in the process of finalising its operational and design features, one thing is already clear: the resources currently available are orders of magnitude below the scale of actual loss and damage needs,” said Vera Künzel, Senior Advisor for Climate Change Adaptation and Human Rights at Germanwatch, a German non-profit known for publishing the Global Climate Risk Index, an annual ranking of countries most affected by extreme weather events.
The fund was welcomed with great enthusiasm and high expectations, but it is currently far from being able to meet those expectations, she adds.
Nepal’s request adds a further complication. It is not a standard proposal seeking project-based support, but an appeal for immediate, rapid response. Rapid response is a distinctive feature of FRLD’s design, setting it apart from other climate finance mechanisms. However, it has not yet built the machinery to deliver.
Wilkinson and Chhetri echo the same. “The fund’s governing instrument explicitly allows it to support rapid response measures. However, under the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM), the name given to its pilot phase, there is no provision to do so,” says Wilkinson. “Applications to the fund currently being reviewed far outstrip funds available, and so it would have to reject some of these in order to provide funding to Nepal. There are other humanitarian funds and organisations better positioned to provide rapid response funding — like the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund.”
Chhetri says that FRLD has the provision of rapid response in its governing instrument, though the modalities are not yet fleshed out on how to operationalise that part of its governing instrument. “For now, the Board can agree to support Nepal as a case of urgency, while working out the modalities later,” he says.
At a recent Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group ministerial meeting in Dili, Timor-Leste on September 3, member states expressed solidarity with the people of Nepal. They adopted a declaration flagging that demand for FRLD support already far exceeds the fund’s available resources, and calling for clearer guidance on mobilising additional funding.
Nepal’s request, is strongly backed by other LDCs and developing nations, Künzel says. She expects the board to respond positively. The “polluter pays” principle is well established in international environmental and climate policy and reflected in the broader architecture of the Paris Agreement. Support for countries like Nepal is not charity but an obligation rooted in responsibility and fairness, she says.
Beyond that, it tests whether the multilateral system can be trusted to function when it is needed most, she says.
Banner image: Houses damaged by recent flash floods stand amid thick layers of sludge, mud and debris in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, September 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)
Read more: Nepal’s flood disaster puts its hydropower-first strategy, exports to the test
Credits
