On August 26, the world witnessed yet another catastrophe in the Himalayas. Flash floods tore through Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts and along the border with China, leaving an estimated 1,300 dead and nearly 5,000 missing.
These numbers will rise. Nepal, cradled in the world’s highest mountain range, is once again being punished for a crime it did not commit.
There is a Nepali proverb: Dhan khane muso, chot paune bhyaguto (A frog is punished for a rat’s mistake), meaning in English, “the guilty party escapes blame, while the innocent suffers the consequences.”
This is no longer merely a folk saying—it has become the objective reality of Nepal’s existence in the Western-led world order that has abandoned any pretense of justice.
This is not a natural calamity. It is a brutal stress-test of an unequal global system, one in which the West has outsourced its emissions while hoarding the benefits of industrialization. The consequences are now washing down the slopes of the Himalayas.
Whose crime? Who punished?
Nepal’s annual per capita carbon dioxide emissions stand at a paltry 0.5 to 0.63 tons. Its total fossil CO₂ output is roughly 15.89 million tons per year—less than 0.1% of the global total.
The world average is 4.67 tons per person; in many Western countries, emissions are dozens of times higher than Nepal’s. Even including methane and nitrous oxide, Nepal’s per capita greenhouse-gas impact barely reaches 1.6 to 2 tons.
Why should a nation with such a negligible contribution bear such a devastating cost? The answer is lucid: this catastrophe is the direct consequence of carbon that Western countries have pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Their emissions are melting Himalayan glaciers at unprecedented rates. Glacial lakes are swelling to dangerous levels; the risk of catastrophic outburst floods grows with each passing year.
This is no coincidence—it is the cruel asymmetry between historical responsibility and geographical vulnerability. The cause belongs to one set of nations; the consequences fall upon another.
Structural debt trap
The roots of this inequality run deeper still. Institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have imposed structural conditions that have systematically de-industrialized Nepal.
The industrial sector’s contribution to GDP continues to shrink, even as Western companies capture profits from the machinery, vehicles, and aircraft Nepal must import. Nepal has been denied the right to choose its own development path; instead, it is being ensnared in a new debt trap, dressed up as “climate finance.”
Between 2011 and 2021, Nepal received approximately US$5.71 billion in climate finance. About $3 billion came from multilateral development banks—the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank—mostly as loans. The World Bank alone contributed roughly $1.7 billion; the ADB provided $1.1 billion.
Recent years have followed the same pattern: $100 million in policy loans under the GRID program, $150 million in Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Options for disaster resilience, $52 million for clean-air projects — all loans.
The ADB committed another $100 million for GRID, a grant-based loan for climate-resilient scenarios, $170 million for Kathmandu’s water-supply improvements, and hundreds of millions more for irrigation projects—again, all loans. In 2025 alone, the ADB pledged roughly $709 million for mitigation and adaptation in Nepal, but most of it came as concessional loans. Nepal’s foreign debt now stands at about 26% of GDP.
How is it just to make Nepal a debtor to solve a crisis it did not create? Though termed “concessional”, these instruments remain debts—principal and interest that a least-developed country must repay out of its meager development budget.
Turning climate victims into debtors is the moral bankruptcy of Western financial institutions. Those who committed the crime disguise their guilt by distributing “assistance” with strings attached: loans instead of grants, conditions instead of compensation. This is structural hypocrisy.
Western double standards
At the 2009 Copenhagen conference, the developed world committed to providing 100 billion USD per year in climate assistance to developing countries from 2020. Even 15 years later, it has not kept this commitment.
The Loss and Damage Fund, formed at the COP27 conference in 2022, remains underfunded and slow to make payments. However, the West managed to send more than $300 billion in weapons and other forms of support to Ukraine just a few months after the Russian “Special Military Operation.”
The meaning is clear: money and technology can be moved easily when political interests are at stake. But when the lives of poor and small countries in the Global South are threatened, the commitment remains only on paper.
Nepal’s own Nationally Determined Contribution 3.0 estimates that roughly $73.74 billion is needed for mitigation alone by 2035, with more than 85% dependent on international cooperation. An additional $18-20 billion is needed for adaptation—bringing the total to more than $90 billion.
Yet available finance comes predominantly as loans, compounding the debt burden and weakening adaptive capacity. This is a vicious cycle: with each disaster, Nepal grows weaker and more indebted in future.
Global South must unite
This crisis is not unique to Nepal. Bangladesh, the Maldives, small island states and landlocked African countries all suffer the same injustice: those who did not commit the crime pay the highest price. They are punished for others’ sins. Yet if these countries approach negotiations in isolation, their voices will remain faint before the Western powers.
It is time for least-developed and developing countries to form a united front and make clear demands.
First, climate finance must be grant-based, not loan-based—because it is not “cooperation” but compensation for historical emissions and historical injustice. Second, the Loss and Damage Fund must be immediately capitalized and made accessible without bureaucratic obstruction.
Third, a substantial portion of the external debt of least-developed and climate-vulnerable countries must be written off immediately, so that disaster management does not become an additional burden. A debt-cancellation campaign must be launched without a delay.
Fourth, technology transfer and capacity-building must be freed from the shackles of so-called intellectual-property rights. This requires negotiations with Western countries and the BRICS nations alike.
Fifth, the Global South must secure representation and decision-making power in global forums such as the UNFCCC. Policy and leadership must emerge from least-developed countries, not be shaped solely for industrialized nations’ convenience.
A mirror for humanity
This Himalayan crisis is not the fate of any one country — it is an early warning of a common risk to all humanity. If those who bear historical responsibility do not act justly now, greater disasters will follow. And the moral burden of inaction will ultimately rest with those same Western nations and institutions.
Nepal’s floods are not merely a natural disaster; they mirror the injustice of a Western-led world order. The story of “A frog is punished for a rat’s mistake” must be changed. The demand for climate justice is no longer merely a moral appeal — it is a historic and imperative claim of the Global South. It must be raised, and raised unceasingly.
Let us raise the flag of solidarity.
Follow Bhim Bhurtel on X at @BhimBhurtel. Subscribe to his Substack here.
