CAMEROON – Nepal’s prime minister used his address to world leaders Thursday to deliver a sharp warning: a deadly flood in his country shows how climate change is devastating nations that contributed little to the crisis but are now being forced to pay the price.
Speaking Thursday night at the U.N. General Assembly, Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah said the August disaster “was not just a local tragedy. It was a warning to the world. And I ask you today: Have you really heard that warning?” Nearly three years earlier, he noted, the U.N. secretary-general had stood beneath Mount Everest and warned of the “madness and impending climate disaster” facing humanity.
“That cry from the rooftop of the world was not heard enough,” Shah 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 vulnerable people require.”
International scientists have linked climate-driven permafrost melting, caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, to glacier instability. A partial glacier collapse triggered a massive flood that has killed at least 1,400 people, with many more still missing.
Shah said Nepal produces less than one-tenth of 1% of the heat-trapping gases responsible for climate change. Around 99% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, while the flooding trapped many workers inside tunnels.
“We did not create this crisis, yet we are paying a colossal price for it,” said Shah, 36, a former rapper and engineer who is the youngest head of government to address the General Assembly this year. “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.”
He said climate change “does not recognize borders.”
Wearing a black Dhaka topi, a traditional brimless Nepali hat, and his signature dark sunglasses, which he uses for medical reasons, Shah said the “tragic consequences of a warming climate” demonstrate that “climate change does not recognize borders. Glaciers and floods do not travel with stamps and passports.”
Subeksha Khadka, a humanitarian and former Miss Nepal International, praised Shah’s remarks in an online interview and repeated the warning: “This time Nepal has been the target, but it could be anyone. This is our story right now, and it can be anybody else’s tomorrow. So it’s time to act.”
Shah did not request a specific amount of aid, but he criticized the international financing system as inadequate and overly bureaucratic. His criticism included the loss and damage fund agreed upon several years ago for poorer countries facing climate disasters they did not cause.
“Climate finance must not become another bureaucratic maze through which vulnerable countries spend years” maneuvering when they urgently need assistance, Shah said. “When the house is burning, we do not ask a family to complete 50 forms. We act. This is what climate justice means.”
He urged the General Assembly to act on relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction — traditional pillars of international assistance — while also embracing “responsibility, reparation, resilience.” The idea of reparation remains contentious among industrialized Western nations such as the United States, historically the world’s largest carbon emitter.
He said it was “not an isolated disaster.”
Over the past 75 years, the United States has released about 1,500 times more carbon into the atmosphere than Nepal, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks greenhouse gas emissions by country. Historical emissions are significant because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for more than a century, trapping heat.
The United States announced $31 million in aid for Nepal’s flood recovery this week, bringing its total financial assistance to $36 million. That is less than 1% of the country’s needs.
“Preliminary assessments indicate that from the recent disaster alone, Nepal has suffered losses of over $5 billion, nearly 15% of our GDP and a third of our annual budget,” Nepal’s foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, said Wednesday at the U.N. climate summit. “Thus for Nepal, this catastrophe is not merely a humanitarian emergency. It is a development emergency dismantling years of progress. It is a justice crisis exposing the inequities of global climate action and it is an existential crisis striking at the very survival of our communities and our future.”
“What happened in Nepal is not an isolated disaster but a preview of what awaits many vulnerable nations,” Khanal said.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said in an interview that Nepal’s disaster shows the climate crisis is “getting worse much faster” than people can manage. He said it also foreshadows the consequences of melting glaciers that supply Asia’s great rivers, putting the water supplies of 2 billion people at risk.
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Delgado reported from New York. Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report.
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