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How Will Nepal Pay for the Latest Climate Disaster?

An interview with Nepali UN climate expert Manjeet Dhakal on what the massive Himalayan flood will cost Nepal.

A man surveys the debris of a collapsed building at a town along the Trishuli River, in Devighat, Nuwakot, Nepal, on August 31, 2026.

It’s still the rainy season in South Asia, and people in Nepal have come to expect increasingly extreme monsoon floods. But it wasn’t raining when the flood came this time. The water came not from the clouds but from the mountain itself.

The Himalayan glaciers, the planet’s Third Pole, are melting at an accelerating rate, along with the thawing permafrost that has long held this thin-air cryosphere together like glue.

On the morning of August 26, an enormous chunk of glacier and mountain at some 17,000 feet gave way on the north face of Langtang Lirung, setting off a cascade that sent a tsunami-like flood of water-and-rock slurry down the Bhotekoshi River on the Nepal-Tibet border and on down the heavily populated Trishuli River in the hills of central Nepal. As of this writing, more than 900 lives have been lost, with more than 4,200 missing, according to the Nepali government. (China’s state media reports “significant” losses, with more than 500 missing on the Tibet side of the border.)

Settlements, bridges, and roads along the river—including a vital trade route to China—have been swept away. And in addition to the cost in lives and property, more than 10 percent of Nepal’s crucial hydropower capacity has been destroyed.

How Nepal, a poor developing country of 30 million people that is among the most vulnerable to climate change, will pay for this disaster and many others—and whether it can adapt to climate change in meaningful ways—are not only economic questions but also deeply political and moral ones. (My forthcoming feature in The Nation’s October issue looks at Nepal’s alarming climate crisis and its complex political and human rights situation.) To date, the world’s wealthiest and most historically responsible nations have failed to commit anywhere close to enough funding for adaptation and loss-and-damage in developing countries.

To understand the scale of this disaster’s impact on Nepal, and the prospect of international assistance, in the days after the flood I spoke with the Nepali climate expert Manjeet Dhakal, director of Climate Analytics South Asia in Kathmandu, who heads the United Nations’ Least Developed Countries Support Team. Dhakal has been closely involved in the creation of the UN’s climate loss-and-damage fund. He told me that though the fund is not yet fully operational, there are now internal discussions underway about providing emergency assistance to Nepal.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wen Stephenson: The scale of this disaster is shocking, especially in terms of the human lives lost. The scope and scale of the damage is historic, yes?

Manjeet Dhakal: Yes, it’s historic. With climate change, the scientists have been warning about this. But the scale was something beyond the predictions.

WS: To put this disaster in context, what does it mean for Nepal that it struck this specific region? The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli river basin is both a crucial transport route to China and is also described as “the backbone of Nepal’s energy sector.” It’s reported........

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