KATHMANDU, Nepal — Shradha Shrestha, a former minister in the Nepal government and tourism expert at the Nepal Tourism Board, said Nepal must not be left to face this crisis alone.
She forwarded an official appeal by her government, signed by the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Agriculture, Forest and Environment
When a climate-vulnerable country faces a disaster beyond its capacity to respond, international solidarity must mean more than words. It must mean rapid, accessible and adequate financing when it is needed most.
The catastrophic Bhote Koshi flash floods have once again shown the brutal reality of the climate crisis for countries like Nepal—countries that have contributed negligibly to global emissions, yet are paying an enormous price through loss of lives, livelihoods, infrastructure and development gains.
This is a demand for climate justice.We hope the Loss and Damage Fund demonstrates that it can respond with speed, flexibility, humanity and justice. Tourism professionals in Nepal are sounding the alarm — the climate alarm.
For a country whose global identity and tourism economy are inseparable from the Himalayas, climate change is no longer an abstract environmental debate. It is increasingly becoming a question of safety, infrastructure, livelihoods, and the future of some of the most famous mountain destinations on Earth.
LilaDhar Bhandari, CEO of Nepal-based destination management company Going Nepal, reached out to eTurboNews with an urgent appeal to the United Nations, world leaders, and global industrialists. His message is straightforward:
Nepal did little to create the global climate crisis, but it is increasingly being asked to pay its price.
“Those who contributed least to the problem should not be forced to carry the greatest burden,” Bhandari told eTurboNews in an extensive appeal calling for international financing, technology, early-warning systems and greater responsibility from high-emitting economies and industries.
For Nepal’s tourism sector, this is not somebody else’s environmental issue.
It is becoming a business issue, a development issue and, increasingly, a human-security issue.
The alarm is coming from the mountains
Scientific evidence gives considerable weight to the concerns coming from Nepal.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, reported in March 2026 that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya are losing ice at twice the rate recorded around the beginning of this century. Its latest assessment found a roughly 12% reduction in glacier area across the region between 1990 and 2020. The consequences extend far beyond Nepal.
The Hindu Kush Himalayan cryosphere — the glaciers, snow and frozen ground of the region — provides water that ultimately supports more than two billion people downstream. ICIMOD has warned that glacier loss, changing snowfall, thawing permafrost and increasingly unpredictable river flows pose mounting risks to water, food and energy security.
Earlier research found that Himalayan glaciers disappeared 65% faster during 2011–2020 than during the preceding decade. Under current emissions trajectories, ICIMOD has warned that the region could lose as much as 80% of its present glacier volume by the end of this century.
Even if warming is held below 2°C, substantial glacier loss is already projected. The Himalayas are consequently more than a spectacular backdrop for Everest expeditions and trekking holidays.
They are part of Asia’s water infrastructure.
When climate risk becomes tourism risk
For Nepal, the connection between the environment and tourism is unusually direct.
Mount Everest, the Annapurna region, Langtang and countless Himalayan communities have made the country one of the world’s iconic adventure destinations. Trekking, mountaineering, guiding, hotels, restaurants, transportation and destination services generate livelihoods far beyond Kathmandu.
Climate instability can disrupt that economic chain.
Floods and landslides can destroy roads and bridges. Extreme weather can isolate destinations. Glacial lake outburst floods can threaten settlements and tourism facilities. Changing snow and ice conditions can alter mountain routes.
And when infrastructure disappears, tourism does not simply lose scenery. It loses access.
Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation continues to document the country’s substantial international visitor economy, making the resilience of tourism infrastructure an increasingly important national economic concern.
Bhandari says protecting Nepal’s mountains must therefore be understood as both an environmental and an economic responsibility.
“Tourism provides employment, foreign exchange, entrepreneurship and opportunities for communities across Nepal,” he said. “But climate-induced environmental degradation increasingly threatens this important source of sustainable development.”
Thame was a warning
One event demonstrates how rapidly a Himalayan hazard can become a tourism and community disaster. On August 16, 2024, a destructive glacial lake outburst flood struck Thame in Nepal’s Everest region.
Thame is no anonymous settlement. It is part of the cultural and tourism landscape of Khumbu and the home region of generations of internationally celebrated Sherpa mountaineers.
Subsequent ICIMOD research determined that a rock avalanche struck a glacial lake at about 4,900 meters, producing a displacement wave that breached the lake. Water then descended and helped breach a second lake.
Approximately 459,000 cubic meters of water were released from the two lakes.
The resulting flood displaced 135 people, destroyed 25 homes and damaged community infrastructure. Debris was transported as far as 80 kilometers downstream.
There was, remarkably, no loss of life.
But the event offered a disturbing demonstration of the cascading hazards scientists are increasingly studying in a warming high-mountain environment.
ICIMOD describes the Everest region as a hotspot for cryosphere-related hazards and says five significant glacial lake outburst floods have affected the area in less than 50 years.
And the danger did not stop there
In July 2025, another major flood struck Nepal’s Rasuwa district and the strategically important Rasuwagadhi border area.
Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology concluded preliminarily that the flood was caused by the outburst of a supraglacial lake in Tibet, roughly 36 kilometers north of the Nepal-China border.
The disaster provided another reminder of an uncomfortable geopolitical reality:
Water does not carry a passport. Neither does climate risk.
A flood originating in one country can destroy bridges, roads, power infrastructure, businesses and livelihoods in another.
That makes satellite monitoring, hydrological data sharing and cross-border early-warning systems not simply scientific luxuries but potentially life-saving infrastructure.
In August 2026, ICIMOD introduced a regional cryosphere strategy aimed at establishing more sustained and standardized monitoring of glaciers, snow and permafrost across the Hindu Kush Himalaya.
The need for such cooperation is becoming difficult to ignore.
Nepal’s case for climate justice
Bhandari’s argument is not that climate change should be blamed for every landslide, flood or avalanche in Nepal.
Mountain disasters have always occurred, and individual events can have multiple interacting causes — geology, weather, infrastructure, land use and natural variability among them.
His argument is broader.
A warming climate is changing the environment in which these hazards occur.
And countries with comparatively small historical responsibility for global greenhouse-gas accumulation often possess far fewer financial resources to adapt to the consequences.
Nepal submitted its latest Nationally Determined Contribution, NDC 3.0, to the UN climate system in May 2025, outlining its own climate commitments.
But adaptation can be extraordinarily expensive for a mountainous developing country.
Climate-resilient highways must cross unstable slopes. Hydropower projects must withstand changing river behavior. Remote communities require communications and warning systems. Glacial lakes need monitoring. Tourism infrastructure must be designed for changing environmental conditions.
The World Bank’s Nepal Country Climate and Development Report has already warned that flooding, heat stress and climate impacts on agriculture and livestock can act as a continuing drag on the country’s economic growth.
Its recommendations include stronger early-warning systems, disaster-risk management, resilient roads and coordinated climate financing.
For Bhandari, that financing is where global responsibility enters the picture.
A message to global industrialists
Bhandari is directing part of his appeal not only toward governments but toward the world’s largest corporations, industrial interests and fossil-fuel producers.
“Economic success must come with environmental responsibility,” he argues.
He is calling on major industries and high-emitting economies to accelerate emissions reductions, invest in cleaner technology and contribute substantially to adaptation and loss-and-damage financing in highly vulnerable countries.
His message to global business is deliberately uncomfortable:
Profit cannot be privatized while climate losses are socialized onto communities that played almost no role in creating the problem.
The issue has become central to international climate diplomacy.
Developing nations have spent years arguing that adaptation financing and mechanisms addressing climate-related loss and damage must accompany emissions reductions. Nepal provides an especially visible example.
The people living underneath melting glaciers are not the people who built the world’s largest industrial economies.
Yet they may be among the first asked to move, rebuild or start again when disaster strikes.
Nepal does not want sympathy after the disaster
Bhandari says the traditional international response is no longer sufficient.
Emergency assistance often arrives after a bridge has disappeared, a village has been damaged or families have lost their homes.
Nepal, he argues, needs investment beforedisaster.
His proposal calls for international support for climate loss and damage; glacier and glacial-lake monitoring; satellite technology; early-warning and disaster-response systems; climate-resilient roads, bridges, hydropower and tourism infrastructure; climate-risk insurance; ecosystem and watershed protection; community adaptation; and emergency financing.
Prevention may not produce dramatic television images.
But a warning system that evacuates a village before a flood arrives can be worth far more than international assistance delivered after the village is gone.
A Nepal Climate Resilience mechanism?
Bhandari is going further.
He is calling on the United Nations, the UN climate system, development banks, international partners and major industrial economies to consider what he describes as a dedicated Nepal Climate Resilience and Loss & Damage Mechanism. His four requirements for climate financing are simple:
Predictable. Accessible. Timely. Long-term.Such a proposal would inevitably require negotiation over who pays, who administers the funds, how projects are selected, and how accountability is maintained.
But the principle behind it reflects a much wider frustration among climate-vulnerable developing countries: financing that arrives years after a project is proposed — or only after catastrophe — cannot always be called resilience.
Tourism should have a seat at the climate table
There is another message in Bhandari’s appeal that deserves attention from the global travel industry.
Tourism tends to discuss climate change through aviation emissions, carbon footprints and sustainable hotels.
In Nepal, the conversation looks different. Here, climate adaptation can mean keeping the road to a destination open. It can mean monitoring the lake above a trekking community.
It can mean determining whether a bridge, lodge, hydropower station or mountain trail is positioned in tomorrow’s flood path rather than yesterday’s.
It can mean ensuring guides and communities receive reliable weather and hazard information. And it means asking whether the international tourism industry benefiting from extraordinary natural destinations has a responsibility to help protect their resilience.
Travel companies, tour operators, airlines, hotel groups, insurers and investors may increasingly need to see climate adaptation not as corporate philanthropy but as destination protection. There is no sustainable tourism industry without sustainable destinations.
The human beings behind the statistics
It is easy to describe Himalayan climate change through satellite imagery, glacier-mass calculations and temperature graphs.
It is harder to measure what disappears when a mountain community is displaced. A house can be rebuilt. A road can eventually be reopened.
But disasters can also remove agricultural land, family businesses, ancestral homes, cultural sites, and relationships between people and landscapes developed over generations.
Mountain and Indigenous communities that contributed very little to global greenhouse-gas emissions are often among those facing the greatest exposure.
That makes the Himalayan climate question one of justice as much as science.
The Third Pole belongs to more than Nepal
The phrase “Third Pole” is sometimes used too casually.
It describes the immense frozen reserves of High Mountain Asia outside the Arctic and Antarctic. But its significance is practical. Snow and ice stored in these mountains feed river systems upon which enormous populations depend.
Changes taking place thousands of meters above sea level can eventually influence agriculture, electricity generation, ecosystems and water availability hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. This is why Bhandari rejects the idea that Nepal’s climate problem belongs only to Nepal.
“The climate crisis is a stark example of how global environmental changes have far-reaching impacts that transcend national borders,” he said.
Protecting the Himalayas, he argues, is therefore not about preserving a postcard. It is about protecting part of a continental life-support system.
From Kathmandu to the United Nations
There is a temptation whenever climate diplomacy becomes difficult to reduce the argument to a familiar confrontation between rich and poor countries.
The Himalayan reality is more complicated.
Nepal must strengthen its own building standards, land-use planning, disaster preparedness and environmental governance. Tourism developers need to avoid placing infrastructure in known high-risk locations. Hydropower and road projects require rigorous climate and geological risk assessment.
Regional governments must share data. The international community must finance adaptation. And major emitting economies still need to reduce the emissions driving long-term warming. These actions are not alternatives.
They have to happen together. Nepal cannot stop Himalayan warming by itself. But the rest of the world cannot write Nepal a check and declare the problem solved either.
Nepal is becoming the warning
For generations, the Himalayas symbolized permanence. That assumption is becoming harder to sustain.
- Responsibility.
- Technology.
- Financing.
- Preparedness.
- And action — before the next disaster strikes.
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