Nepal seeks climate compensation from India, China and US after deadly floods leave 4,000 missing

Nepal is demanding climate compensation from the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases after deadly floods in the country killed more than a thousand people and left even more missing.

China, the US and India have made “extremely large” contributions to climate change and left smaller nations “enduring the price of it,” Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal told Kantipur TV.

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“Nepal must hold its head high internationally and turn this into a matter of justice,” he said in the interview, which was broadcast earlier this week. “We will raise this matter explicitly and forcefully on international platforms.”

Nepal’s demand for climate compensation follows the Aug. 26 flash floods in the Bhotekoshi River basin, triggered by a massive rock and ice collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border. The official death toll has risen to 1,114, with nearly 4,000 people still missing, according to authorities, as floodwaters destroyed homes, key bridges and critical hydropower infrastructure.

The demand comes ahead of the United Nations’ annual climate summit in November, where developing nations are expected to press wealthier, high-emitting countries for more funding to cover climate-related losses and damage. Nepal’s push adds to a broader debate over who should bear the financial cost of disasters linked to a warming planet.

Also read: When roads end, drones carry dead home in flood-hit Nepal

“Nepal cannot reduce the world’s emissions on behalf of the polluters. It cannot protect the Himalayas through adaptation alone while the world continues to burn more fossil fuels,” the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a civil society coalition of 200 international groups, said in a statement on Tuesday. “And it should not have to take on more debt to protect its people from a crisis overwhelmingly created elsewhere.”

In the interview, Khanal said that Nepal has sought urgent relief from the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, set up to help vulnerable countries recover from climate-related disasters. According to local media, officials said in a letter to the fund that recovery costs far exceed domestic resources and that waiting for its board to meet in December would be too late.

Representatives for Nepal’s Ministry of Forests and Environment and the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage did not immediately respond to requests for comment.