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Nepal’s tourism industry is increasingly exposed to climate-related floods, landslides and glacier hazards. As world leaders discuss climate finance, a harder question is emerging: Who will pay for the damage to Himalayan tourism and the livelihoods depending on it?
OPINION |Nepal’s tourism industry is facing growing economic losses from climate-related disasters as floods, landslides, extreme rainfall and glacier hazards threaten trekking routes, mountain communities and tourism infrastructure across the Himalayas. Nepal’s own 2025 climate submission estimates preliminary losses from the September 2024 floods and landslides at about US$345 millionand specifically recognizes tourism, businesses, employment and livelihoods within the country’s loss-and-damage challenge.
Yet the global Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage had US$822.06 million pledged as of March 2026, with US$250 million allocated to its initial 2025–26 interventions.
That creates an uncomfortable question for Nepal and the global travel industry: When climate change damages the tourism economy of countries that contributed comparatively little to global warming, who should actually pay the bill?
The Himalayas Are Changing While Tourism Keeps Selling Them
Nepal sells what few countries on Earth can offer: Everest, Annapurna, Langtang, Manaslu and an extraordinary combination of mountains, communities, culture and adventure. But the product itself is changing.
The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, reported in March 2026 that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya have been losing ice at an accelerating rate, with rates of ice loss doubling since 2000. One particularly symbolic example is Nepal’s Yala Glacier in Langtang, which ICIMOD says has shrunk by 66 percent and retreated 784 meters since measurements began in the 1970s.
This is not a theoretical climate model describing the year 2100. It is happening in one of Nepal’s tourism regions now.
The danger is not limited to disappearing ice. The 2024 glacial lake outburst flood at Thame in the Everest region demonstrated how suddenly Himalayan risk can become economic reality. According to subsequent ICIMOD research, a rock avalanche triggered a chain reaction that released water from glacial lakes, destroyed 25 homes and displaced 135 people.
Thame is not an anonymous dot on a climate map. It is part of the Everest tourism economy, and that distinction matters.
Nepal Already Knows the Price
Nepal’s Nationally Determined Contribution submitted to the UN climate process in 2025 makes an important admission: loss and damage extends into culture and tourism, employment, businesses and livelihoods. The same document estimates preliminary losses from Nepal’s September 2024 rainfall, floods and landslides at approximately US$345 million.
Even that number cannot tell the whole story. The economic consequences include destinations developing a reputation for danger, trekking seasons being disrupted, guides losing income, businesses losing bookings and communities seeing cultural heritage and tourism opportunities damaged alongside physical infrastructure.
This is where climate accounting becomes uncomfortable. A destroyed bridge is relatively easy to price. A damaged tourism economy is not.
The World Finally Has a Fund. So Where Is the Money?
After decades of arguments between developed and developing countries, the international community finally established the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. As of March 15, 2026, US$822.06 million had been pledgedby 27 partners, yet only US$250 millionwas allocated for the Fund’s 2025–2026 start-up interventions under its Barbados Implementation Modalities.
Developing countries particularly vulnerable to climate change are eligible, and initial requests under the mechanism were generally designed in the US$5 million to US$20 million range. Compare that with Nepal’s preliminary US$345 million loss from just one major 2024 rainfall disaster, and the uncomfortable mathematics of climate justice becomes apparent.
The world has finally constructed the cash register. But there may not be nearly enough cash inside it.
Should the Global Tourism Industry Pay More?
There is another question the global travel industry may not enjoy hearing: Should tourism itself contribute more?
International tour operators sell Everest, airlines transport travelers to Nepal, travel agencies package Himalayan adventures, and hotels, booking platforms, insurers and adventure companies participate in an economic ecosystem built around destinations such as Nepal.
This does not make tourism responsible for every landslide, flood or melting glacier, but it does make tourism a stakeholder. Responsible tourism may therefore need to become more ambitious than eliminating plastic bottles, reusing hotel towels and offering a carbon-offset button during checkout.
Global tourism businesses benefiting from climate-vulnerable destinations could participate more directly in destination resilience through emergency funds, safer trekking infrastructure, early-warning systems, insurance mechanisms for local tourism businesses or transparent resilience contributions attached to certain adventure products. Travelers themselves might accept a modest, clearly disclosed Himalayan resilience contribution if they knew that the money directly protected the communities and infrastructure making their journeys possible.
Transparency, however, would be essential. Nobody needs another international financing mechanism in which the administration becomes more visible than the people it was created to help.
Nepal Has Responsibilities Too
Climate justice cannot become an excuse for bad domestic planning. Nepal must strengthen geological and environmental assessments, improve development and building standards, invest in early-warning systems and ensure that tourism infrastructure reflects changing mountain risks.
The tourism industry also needs a credible national system for calculating climate-related losses. That means measuring lost hotel nights and trekking bookings, income losses among guides and porters, damage to trails, bridges and tourism facilities, and the economic consequences when international perceptions of danger cause cancellations even in destinations unaffected by a particular disaster.
If Nepal cannot document those losses convincingly, it will have difficulty asking somebody else to pay them.
Climate justice requires evidence as well as emotion.
Not Every Disaster Can Be Blamed on Climate Change
There is also a danger in oversimplifying the story. Not every flood, landslide or mountain disaster can honestly be labelled a direct consequence of climate change. Geology, extreme weather, land use, construction standards and infrastructure decisions can all influence the severity of an event.
Nepal itself must therefore resist the temptation to put a climate-change label on every disaster and send the invoice abroad. But acknowledging those complexities does not eliminate the larger problem. Scientific assessments increasingly show that human-induced warming is intensifying important climate-related risks, while changing glaciers and mountain environments introduce additional hazards for Himalayan communities.
The serious discussion is therefore not about assigning every landslide a climate culprit. It is about determining which losses are climate-related, measuring them credibly and deciding how responsibility for those losses should be shared.
Nepal Needs More Than Sympathy
This brings us to perhaps the most uncomfortable question. If wealthy economies acknowledge that vulnerable countries such as Nepal are suffering disproportionate climate damage, but financing reaching affected communities remains small compared with actual losses, what does “climate justice”mean in practical terms?
International conferences, declarations, photographs of world leaders and promises of future financing do not replace a porter’s lost income, supply a mountain lodge isolated by a destroyed road or rebuild a village damaged by a glacial flood.
Nepal does not simply need the world to feel sorry for the Himalayas. It needs accountability, financing, measurement and resilience.
Tourism deserves a place in that discussion because tourism is one of the industries standing directly on the Himalayan climate frontline.
When Everest Melts, Who Gets the Bill?
The central question remains: When the Himalayas change, who bears the loss?
The cost includes rebuilding roads and trekking trails, restoring tourism businesses, protecting workers whose seasonal income disappears, and preparing communities for hazards that may become more difficult and expensive to manage.
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