Nepal’s Clean Energy Future
Ananya Sridhar
On the morning of August 26, 2026, a section of mountainside broke loose from Langtang Lirung, a mountain in Nepal. The break began at 5,200 meters above sea level and released a mass of ice and rock. At first, the world was told it was an earthquake, then a dam break, then a collapsing glacier. All three theories were wrong.
Within hours, scientists had worked out the truth. Hundreds of millions of tons of rock, with a glacier riding on top, had torn down the mountain, hard enough to register as a magnitude 5.7 on seismometers around the world. The flood that followed, which Nepali officials call the Bhotekoshi flood, became the deadliest in the country's recorded history.
Nepal gets over 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower and produces almost none of the world's carbon emissions. Yet, a disaster in one of the fastest-warming mountain regions has killed more than 1,400 of its people. Nepal should rebuild its hydropower system around prevention and early warning, and high-emitting countries that caused the warming should pay for it.
The human toll is still being counted. Nepal Police list at least 1,455 people dead, and more than 5,000 remain missing. Even so, on Monday, October 5, the government announced it is ending the search. The missing count is still drastically high, but officials are shifting focus to reconstruction and recovery.
For many families, this means grieving without a body. Kalpana Malla, from Nuwakot, watched her parents, her sister and her sister's children swept away; "this flood took everything.”
Others are still looking on their own. Usha Khatri spent days searching in riverside towns where bodies had been found for her husband, and she is angry that the government is "giving up on search and rescue." The government cites a tradeoff; it expects rebuilding to cost about $4.8 billion, or 12 percent of a year's economic output. For a country this small, that leaves little room to keep searching for victims.
The damage reaches well beyond the dead and missing. The government counted 7,570 private buildings damaged or destroyed, displacing nearly 33,000 people. UNICEF reports that the flood struck during the school day and damaged or destroyed 23 schools, and that many children are now struggling with fear and anxiety. The people absorbing the harm are ordinary Nepalis, including children, who did not have a say in the emissions that warmed the planet.
By Our World in Data's count, the country has produced about 0.01% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions since 1751. In contrast, the United States, home to four percent of the world's people, has released roughly 20% of all the carbon dioxide humans have emitted since 1850, according to Carbon Brief. China, now the world's largest annual emitter, ranks second at about 13%, and the 27 nations of the European Union account for another 12%.
But when the mountain came down, it was Nepal that paid. The country lost about 10 percent of its power capacity, a setback for a nation that gets more than 90 percent of its electricity from hydropower. Nepal built its energy system on exactly the kind of clean power the world tells every country to adopt, and the disaster still hit it hardest. Nepal loses about $760 million a year to disasters, and its national disaster fund is only a fraction of that.
America's relief response started small. Its first pledge was $500,000, which Mark Ward, former head of USAID's disaster response team, called “embarrassing for the United States, and a bit of a slap at Nepal”. The total has since grown to more than $36 million, still less than a penny for every dollar Nepal needs. This is a symbolic gesture, not real commitment. The country that has put roughly a fifth of the world's carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is paying a sliver of the damage. This gap is a warning: if aid from the biggest polluters stays voluntary, the countries that did the least will keep paying for what others have done.
The Himalayan glaciers continue to lose ice at an accelerating rate, according to the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), so it's important to plan for the future. Experts in Nepal have a plan, but a plan is only as good as the money behind it. The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure estimates that $124 billion worth of Nepal's infrastructure is exposed to climate-driven disasters- far more than a country with Nepal's resources can pay to protect.
Experts have laid out what a safer system would look like. Senior watershed expert Madhukar Upadhyay argues that future projects should be smaller and spread out, and designed with debris flows of this scale in mind. The former Nepal Electricity Authority chief Kulman Ghising is a proponent of early warning systems and alternate evacuation routes. Meanwhile, Ramraj Narasimhan of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure argued that planners should expect some structures to fail and make sure services keep running when they do, with backup routes, backup power and insurance.
All of these are expensive, and Upadhyay warns that after-the-fact compensation cannot fix it on its own, even with money from the loss and damage fund, "the flood will come next year as well." The countries that caused this crisis should pay to protect Nepal from the next flood, not just to compensate for it after the fact.
Nepal did what the world asks of every country, and built its power grid on clean energy, but one flood in August showed how quickly that foundation can be swept away. That is why this November's UN climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye, is crucial. Prime Minister Balendra Shah has been urged to attend and make Nepal's case for loss and damage funding. Those leaders should commit money for prevention and early warning before the next flood season, not only for repairs afterward. If they do not, Upadhyay's warning will come true, and the next flood may find Nepal just as exposed.
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