An interview with Nepali UN climate expert Manjeet Dhakal on what the massive Himalayan flood will cost Nepal.
A man surveys the debris of a collapsed building at a town along the Trishuli River, in Devighat, Nuwakot, Nepal, on August 31, 2026.(Daniel Ceng / Anadolu via Getty Images)
It’s still the rainy season in South Asia, and people in Nepal have come to expect increasingly extreme monsoon floods. But it wasn’t raining when the flood came this time. The water came not from the clouds but from the mountain itself.
The Himalayan glaciers, the planet’s Third Pole, are melting at an accelerating rate, along with the thawing permafrost that has long held this thin-air cryosphere together like glue.
On the morning of August 26, an enormous chunk of glacier and mountain at some 17,000 feet gave way on the north face of Langtang Lirung, setting off a cascade that sent a tsunami-like flood of water-and-rock slurry down the Bhotekoshi River on the Nepal-Tibet border and on down the heavily populated Trishuli River in the hills of central Nepal. As of this writing, more than 900 lives have been lost, with more than 4,200 missing, according to the Nepali government. (China’s state media reports “significant” losses, with more than 500 missing on the Tibet side of the border.)
Settlements, bridges, and roads along the river—including a vital trade route to China—have been swept away. And in addition to the cost in lives and property, more than 10 percent of Nepal’s crucial hydropower capacity has been destroyed.
How Nepal, a poor developing country of 30 million people that is among the most vulnerable to climate change, will pay for this disaster and many others—and whether it can adapt to climate change in meaningful ways—are not only economic questions but also deeply political and moral ones. (My forthcoming feature in The Nation’s October issue looks at Nepal’s alarming climate crisis and its complex political and human rights situation.) To date, the world’s wealthiest and most historically responsible nations have failed to commit anywhere close to enough funding for adaptation and loss-and-damage in developing countries.
To understand the scale of this disaster’s impact on Nepal, and the prospect of international assistance, in the days after the flood I spoke with the Nepali climate expert Manjeet Dhakal, director of Climate Analytics South Asia in Kathmandu, who heads the United Nations’ Least Developed Countries Support Team. Dhakal has been closely involved in the creation of the UN’s climate loss-and-damage fund. He told me that though the fund is not yet fully operational, there are now internal discussions underway about providing emergency assistance to Nepal.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Wen Stephenson
Wen Stephenson: The scale of this disaster is shocking, especially in terms of the human lives lost. The scope and scale of the damage is historic, yes?
Manjeet Dhakal: Yes, it’s historic. With climate change, the scientists have been warning about this. But the scale was something beyond the predictions.
WS: To put this disaster in context, what does it mean for Nepal that it struck this specific region? The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli river basin is both a crucial transport route to China and is also described as “the backbone of Nepal’s energy sector.” It’s reported that more than 10 percent of Nepal’s hydropower capacity was knocked out by this disaster. How important is hydropower for Nepal’s economy? And what does this mean going forward?
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
We can play this critical role because of support from readers like you. This June, we’re raising $20,000 to power The Nation’s independent journalism in the run-up to November’s immensely consequential elections.
It’s in our power to build a more just society, and your support at this critical moment brings us closer to that bold vision. I hope you’ll donate today.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
MD: There was about 500 megawatts of hydropower running, plus another roughly 200 megawatts that were in the last stages of construction, so roughly 700 to 750 megawatts has been heavily impacted.
And this is the peak season. Nepal has started exporting roughly 1,000 megawatts [1 gigawatt] of hydroelectricity to India during the rainy season, which has become a huge backbone for the economy.
So this obviously has set back the country in a number of ways, but the implication seems it will go much, much further. You mentioned the trade route. This is the new route that has been in operation for the past few years. There were 400-plus container trucks near Rasuwa, on the road with imports from China, with more than 1,000 drivers, workers and traders missing. The business will be heavily impacted, and in the longer run, with the energy infrastructure damage, the impact will go much higher.
Maybe this is a small thing, but there is also the electric vehicle exhibition going on in Kathmandu. [EV sales have surged in Nepal] and many of these new vehicles were there in the port of entry at the border and were completely washed away.
So you can imagine the trickle-down effect in the longer run. It’s massive.
WS: One thing to emphasize is that the pain of this disaster will reach Nepalis far beyond the immediate area where the flood has taken place. It will be felt from the Himalaya to the Tarai, in the plains. The last time we talked, two years ago, you mentioned how one major disaster can have a large impact on the country’s economy.
MD: Before the earthquake in 2015, the GDP growth rate was around 5 percent. Right after the earthquake, it was 0.8 percent. So yes, one disaster can set back the country’s economy. I was looking at the data for this year, and in 2025, GDP growth was 4.6 percent. In 2026, because of the political instability [following the September GenZ uprising], it has gone down to around 2.7 percent. But now with the majority government, the multilateral banks were sending a very positive signal, that the growth rate would be 5 percent in 2027. Now that will fall with this one disaster, with the energy, the export-import, the loss of property, the agricultural impact. A number of things.
WS: A disaster like this always raises talk about climate loss-and-damage funding through the UN process, but we all know that process is slow and uncertain. How does Nepal absorb the economic impact of something like this? How will it pay for recovery? There will be a certain amount of grant assistance, but presumably this will add to Nepal’s already heavy debt burden. Is there any realistic hope of loss-and-damage funds in the near future?
MD: Yeah, the scale is so massive. We’ll soon come up with an assessment, but this will go into a few billions. The finance minister mentioned $7 billion [Nepal’s GDP is about $50 billion], but it’s a very rough estimate as of now. And then there is also the non-economic factors of human life, which obviously can’t be compensated.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
WS: Right.
MD: What we have seen in the past is, even though the world responds when these events are in the headlines, it fades away after a few months. The 2022 flood in Pakistan, it was all over the news, and then we saw the fate in terms of the scale and the level of support they received.
There have been certain pledges from India and China and other countries, and I think we should be grateful to the international community for that. The multilateral banks, the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, have pledged as well. But the number, it’s so massive, these pledges are not enough.
In terms of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, I am very closely affiliated with it. I was involved in designing the fund as a member of the UN Transitional Committee that established it. The fund is not fully operational, but we have initiated internal discussions on whether it could provide support to Nepal, including through an extraordinary board meeting. There is an opportunity to demonstrate what the fund was designed to deliver.
WS: Would it be a symbolic gesture or would it be a significant amount of funding?
MD: It may only be a symbolic gesture, because the fund still has very limited resources. In 2023, at COP28 in Dubai, around $800 million was pledged, and the fund has yet to receive the full amount. But even a symbolic response could set an important precedent for how the fund responds when such disasters strike vulnerable countries in the future.
WS: Some experts in Nepal are very pessimistic about the prospect of any significant loss-and-damage compensation ever coming. What you would say to them?
MD: Yeah, I think we really have to honor what has been agreed in the multilateral process, in terms of the obligation of the developed countries, the countries with higher emissions. Those obligations have been well articulated, for example, in the Paris Agreement. We keep hearing that with the geopolitics, with the economic situation, there isn’t enough resources. But then at the same time, you also see the billions invested in war. So those arguments really don’t make sense. I think it’s the mindset. We really need to think about the mindset of short-term gain versus the long-term global perspective.
WS: Where do you think it’s going in this next round of the COPs? Do you think loss and damage will be higher on the agenda?
MD: There are just two absolute things. The framework has been agreed in the Paris Agreement and its rules: The global community has to put an effort to urgently reduce emissions, yes, and then mobilize finance at scale. These two things need to happen. For this, obviously, we don’t need just another meeting. It’s a decision that countries can make at the national level, and then we can celebrate when we all meet for this international conference. But it has always been the other way around. We discuss what cannot be done rather than what should be done.
But there are countries with resources, and there are countries who have an obligation, countries with major emissions who need to take responsibility.
WS: This disaster would seem to strengthen the argument made by experts in Nepal about the need to diversify the country’s energy mix, which is so heavily reliant on expensive, large-scale, highly vulnerable hydropower. Could a transition to renewables at scale, and especially solar, be seen as a form of climate adaptation and resilience? We usually think of the transition to solar energy in terms of emissions, but Nepal doesn’t need to cut its emissions, which are negligible, so much as it needs to adapt.
MD: Yes, awareness has grown considerably in recent years about the need for energy diversification, the country being heavily dependent on hydropower. The impact of climate change could be devastating.
I was in the high-impact area just last weekend. I went to Trishuli Bazaar, in Nuwakot, and I visited a solar plant, the largest in Nepal, roughly 25 megawatts. There are other solar plants, on the southern belt in the plains, but not to this scale. The one that I visited was in the valley, to my surprise, and the news says most of it has been damaged. I was thinking of asking, why was that not installed on the top of the mountain?
But I think really the irony of the story is, I was so excited when I saw that solar plant, because I was always putting it in my slides, my presentations, explaining the one best example of energy diversification. And now that plant has been destroyed.
Wen StephensonWen Stephenson is the climate-justice correspondent for The Nation. An independent journalist, essayist, and activist, he is the author of, most recently, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe (Haymarket, 2025). His previous book, What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other (Beacon, 2015), is a personal account of the pivotal early years of the US climate-justice movement.