By Utshab Nepal
The Himalayas have not been a mystery to science. For decades, researchers have tracked their retreating glaciers, shifting snowfall patterns, and swelling glacial lakes. Every scenario points in the same direction: less ice, more instability, and more floods. What has been lacking is not data, but the will to act on it.
For years, Nepal’s message to the world has been the same: our emissions are negligible, yet our mountains, rivers, and farmers pay the price for somebody else’s industrial history. This is climate justice, and it is a fair argument. President Ram Chandra Paudel said almost exactly this at COP29 in Baku, calling for the Loss and Damage Fund to be operationalized without further delay.
The trouble is that saying the right thing at a summit and actually shaping how the world treats you are two very different things. Climate justice is a moral claim; climate diplomacy is a strategy. Nepal has practiced climate diplomacy, but it has not developed it into a sufficiently strategic, leverage-based national policy. The IMF is demonstrating that climate risk has become an economic issue, no longer merely an environmental one.
The World Bank’s Country Climate and Development Report for Nepal, published in 2022, remains one of the most detailed independent assessments of how climate change interacts with the country’s economy, and its conclusions are blunt. Climate variability is already driving food insecurity and poverty, with flooding and heat stress worsening in the southern plains, while the north faces landslides, water stress, and glacial lake outburst floods.
The report also points out that Nepal’s hydropower potential is large enough to help decarbonize its far bigger and more polluting neighbours, with US$200 million in additional annual export revenue between 2022 and 2025 possible from power trade alone. Nepal holds a strategic asset that the entire region needs, and that need can translate into real negotiating power.
ICIMOD, the Kathmandu-headquartered International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, has produced stark assessments of the region’s glaciers. Its recent assessments indicate that at 2°C of warming, the Hindu Kush Himalaya could retain only about 25 percent of its 2020 glacier ice, while limiting warming to 1.5°C could preserve 40–45 percent. ICIMOD has highlighted these findings. They come from peer-reviewed scientific research and an intergovernmental scientific body jointly governed and funded by eight countries, including Nepal, China, India, and Pakistan. The evidence and discussion matter because they demonstrate that the coming decade is decisive and therefore create urgency and potential negotiating leverage.
What Nepal Has Been Doing
Nepal has not been silent. It has participated in every COP since the UNFCCC was established in 1992, used the LDC Group to push for stronger climate finance, advocated mountain-specific concerns, including loss and damage, and proposed the Sagarmatha Sambad as a platform for building a common voice among mountain countries. These efforts have given Nepal visibility and some diplomatic recognition. But visibility is not the same as leverage. Nepal has yet to turn its scientific credibility, Himalayan importance, hydropower potential, and position as a mountain country into a sustained negotiating strategy capable of delivering finance, technology, and stronger international commitments.
Conclusion
None of this means abandoning climate justice. The moral argument is valid, and it should still be made, especially by communities in Melamchi, Mustang, and the Kathmandu Valley that have experienced the loss and damage that COP delegates only discuss in conference halls. But truth and moral weight alone have not translated into finance, technology, or bargaining power at the scale Nepal needs.
Nepal already possesses diplomatic assets, Himalayan science, hydropower, water security, mountain-country solidarity, and a strong case based on climate vulnerability. But it has failed to convert these assets into bargaining power. What is missing is the political will in Kathmandu to turn this evidence into a strong strategic stand. The next chapter has to be diplomacy built on facts Nepal already possesses.
Email: Krnepal99@gmail.comThe writer is an educationalist who frequently writes on climate, culture, education, and politics, with a particular interest in Nepal’s role in these areas.
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