Nepalese prime minister Balendra Shah told the UN General Assembly that the deadly floods that killed at least 1,400 people in his Himalayan country last month were “a warning to the world” about the accelerating impact of the climate crisis.
He also called for an overhaul of international climate finance.
“The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli disaster was not just a local tragedy, it was a warning to the world,” he said in his address on Thursday. “And I ask you today: have we really heard that warning?”
He recalled UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warning of “impending climate disaster” from the foot of Mount Everest nearly three years ago.
"That cry from the rooftop of the world was not heard loudly enough," the premier said. "We in Nepal heard it, our communities heard it, scientists around the world heard it. They repeated it with evidence, but we, the political leaders, have been negligent to translate those warnings into action at the speed and scale that the vulnerable people require."
Scientists linked the flooding, which struck nearly four weeks ago, to melting permafrost destabilising a glacier in the Himalayas, part of a chain of hazards worsened by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Mr Shah, 36, the youngest head of government to address the General Assembly this year, said Nepal contributed less than a tenth of one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
"We did not create this crisis, yet we are paying a colossal price for it," Mr Shah said. "Our glaciers are retreating, our mountain slopes are becoming unstable, our rivers are becoming less predictable, and every major disaster threatens to erase years of development."
Mr Shah didn’t request a specific sum in aid, but criticised the international financial aid system as inadequate and overly bureaucratic, including the loss and damage fund agreed by nations several years ago to help poorer countries hit by climate disasters they did not cause.
Climate finance, he said, must not become another bureaucratic maze for vulnerable nations to spend years navigating when they needed help.
"When the house is burning, we do not ask a family to complete 50 forms. We act. This is what climate justice means."
He called on the UN to act not only on relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction, but on "responsibility, reparation, resilience”, using language that major industrialised emitters like the US were likely to find unsettling.
Over the past 75 years, the US has emitted around 1,500 times more carbon than Nepal, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists tracking national greenhouse gas emissions.
Nepalese foreign minister Shisir Khanal told the General Assembly on Wednesday that preliminary assessments put the country's losses from the floods at over $5bn (£3.7bn), about 15 per cent of its GDP and a third of its annual budget.
"What happened in Nepal is not an isolated disaster but a preview of what awaits many vulnerable nations," he said.
Nepal is demanding $20m, the highest amount available for a single disaster, from the global fund for responding to loss and damage.
The fund currently holds only about $300m against $820m pledged, far short of the scale of need across multiple disaster-hit countries awaiting assistance.
Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said "Nepal's appeal for international support will test the global resolve to assist vulnerable countries and, more broadly, the responsiveness of the global climate regime at a time when geopolitical conditions for climate action are becoming increasingly difficult”.
A board member of the fund told The Independent earlier this month that emergency meetings were planned and Nepal could get a payout within a month or two, though the $20m sum under discussion was a fraction of the billions of dollars in losses the country had reported.
The US this week announced $31m in aid to Nepal for flood recovery, bringing its total assistance to $36m, less than one per cent of the estimated need.
Before Mr Shah, other leaders also called for an overhaul of the climate finance system, and warned against the worsening situation worldwide.
"What is needed is an understanding that the unlevel playing field cannot continue,” said Mia Motley, president of Barbados.
“Climate-vulnerable countries pay 1.2 per cent points on average more than other countries to be able to borrow money,” the president said. “You cannot penalise people who are on the front line of the crisis purely because of their vulnerability to the climate crisis, and that is what we have done by allowing this disparity in interest rates to continue.”
