Nepal Recasts Flood Losses as a Climate-Justice Claim, Testing India’s Stand on Loss and Damage

The news

Kathmandu and New Delhi. An opinion article in The Indian Express on September 22, written by a professor at the School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi, argues that Nepal has changed the terms on which it deals with disasters, and that India must respond. For decades, the writer notes, India acted as a friendly “first responder” whenever cloudbursts, landslides or flash floods struck Nepal. After the recent catastrophic flash floods, however, Nepal’s leadership has moved “from a paradigm of ad-hoc relief to a framework of climate justice and financial liability”. Kathmandu has appealed to the UN-backed Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage — “loss and damage” means the harm from climate change that can no longer be avoided by cutting emissions or adapting, such as destroyed homes and lost lives — while calling on developed countries to deliver compensation and concessional climate finance, meaning loans cheaper than market rates. It is also pressing its neighbours, including China and India, for cooperation on preparedness, data sharing and resilience. Nepal has clarified that it is not seeking damages from any single country, but, the writer says, the expectation placed on its neighbours is unmistakable. Prime Minister Balendra Shah will take the case to the UN General Assembly on September 24. The article cites a $49.9 million Green Climate Fund project to protect Nepalese communities from glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs — sudden floods when a lake dammed by ice or loose glacial debris bursts) that sat in the Fund’s pipeline for over seven years, and says Nepal faces a reconstruction bill of nearly 10 per cent of its GDP. Mountain and downstream nations, it argues, are applying the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities locally, pointing to high-emitting neighbours. The writer’s prescription is that India avoid both legal liability and passive aid, and instead champion a South Asian Resilience and Insurance Facility through the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, BIMSTEC or a “Third Pole Compact” — the Third Pole being the Himalaya–Tibet ice mass — paying out automatically when satellites detect pre-set climate triggers, alongside shared GLOF monitoring data and an open Himalayan early-warning system. The Hindu and The Economic Times carry no report on Nepal’s appeal today, so this account rests on the Express article. The syllabus link is climate finance, the UNFCCC and India’s neighbourhood policy.

Static syllabus linkage

1. Loss and damage is the third pillar of climate action, after mitigation and adaptation. The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage was set up at COP19 in 2013. Article 8 of the Paris Agreement recognises the importance of averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage, but Decision 1/CP.21 that adopted the Agreement states that Article 8 does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation. COP27 at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 decided to establish new funding arrangements, including a dedicated fund, and COP28 at Dubai in 2023 operationalised the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, with the World Bank as its interim trustee. The Santiago Network provides technical assistance to vulnerable countries.
2. Common but differentiated responsibilities is written into the 1992 Convention itself. Article 3.1 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change asks parties to protect the climate system on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC). The Convention divided countries into Annex I (industrialised) and non-Annex I parties; India and Nepal are both non-Annex I. The Paris Agreement kept the principle but added the phrase “in the light of different national circumstances”, which softened the old binary. India has consistently used CBDR to argue that historical emitters must lead on finance.
3. The Green Climate Fund is the main multilateral channel, and it works through accredited entities. The Green Climate Fund was established at COP16 in Cancun in 2010 and is headquartered in Songdo, South Korea. It is an operating entity of the Convention’s financial mechanism and funds both mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries. Money flows through accredited entities — national or international bodies that pass the Fund’s fiduciary standards — which is one reason project cycles are long. The Adaptation Fund, set up under the Kyoto Protocol, is a separate and smaller channel.
4. The Hindu Kush Himalaya is the Third Pole, and GLOFs are its signature hazard. The Hindu Kush Himalaya holds the largest store of ice outside the polar regions and feeds rivers such as the Ganga, Indus and Brahmaputra. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental body headquartered in Kathmandu, has eight regional member countries including India, Nepal and China. India’s National Disaster Management Authority issued guidelines on managing glacial lake outburst floods in 2020. The October 2023 outburst of South Lhonak lake in Sikkim, which breached the Teesta III dam, showed that the hazard is Indian as well as Nepalese.

Why UPSC loves this

1. The syllabus joins environment, disaster management and the neighbourhood. GS3 lists conservation, environmental degradation and disaster management; GS2 lists India and its neighbourhood. A question that asks how India should respond to a neighbour’s climate claim sits across both papers, and examiners reward answers that hold the diplomatic and the environmental argument together rather than treating them in separate paragraphs.
2. Prelims tests the architecture of climate finance. The Commission has asked directly about the Green Climate Fund, and COP outcomes regularly appear as statement-based questions. The likely targets are which COP created which fund, who hosts or trustees it, whether Article 8 creates liability, and what CBDR-RC stands for. Names of current funding pledges are transient; the institutional facts are not.
3. Mains has moved from ‘what was agreed’ to ‘what should India do’. Recent Mains questions on climate conferences have asked candidates to evaluate outcomes and India’s position rather than list them. The Nepal case supplies a concrete test of India’s dual identity — a climate victim and developing country in Bonn, but a larger and wealthier emitter in Kathmandu’s eyes.

Analysis

1. Nepal has borrowed India’s own argument and pointed it at India. India has spent three decades telling the rich world that those who emitted more must pay more. Nepal’s appeal applies the same logic one step down the ladder: to a mountain country of Nepal’s size, India and China are the large emitters next door. The careful clause that Nepal seeks damages from no single country is what makes the argument hard to reject, because it turns a legal claim into a request for cooperation. India cannot dismiss the reasoning without weakening the case it makes at every COP.
2. The fear of a liability precedent is real but already answered in treaty text. The writer is right that paying explicit “climate damages” could expose India to similar claims elsewhere. But the Paris decision already states that Article 8 creates no basis for liability or compensation, and the Loss and Damage Fund was designed on that footing. India can therefore contribute to regional resilience without conceding fault, just as developed countries contribute to the Fund without admitting legal liability. The real danger lies in vocabulary, not in money, which is why the proposal to avoid fault-based terminology is sound.
3. Speed, not size, is the failure of global climate finance. A $49.9 million GLOF project that waited seven years is a sharper indictment than any figure on total pledges. Parametric insurance — which pays out when a measured trigger such as rainfall or lake volume crosses a threshold, not after a loss assessment — is built for exactly this problem, and regional pools such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility have run on this model since 2007. The honest counter-view is basis risk: a trigger can fail to fire when a village is destroyed, or fire when damage is modest. A facility for South Asia would need careful trigger design and Indian satellite data to earn trust.
4. Data sharing is the hardest ask, because rivers are treated as security. India has historically treated hydrological data on shared rivers with caution, and China shares Brahmaputra flood-season data only under specific arrangements. Co-owning GLOF monitoring data with Nepal, as the writer suggests, would require India to see early warning as a public good rather than a strategic asset. That shift would also strengthen India’s hand in asking China for upstream data, since it is difficult to demand from Beijing what one withholds from Kathmandu.
5. A regional facility would insure India as much as Nepal. The Sikkim outburst of 2023 and repeated Himalayan disasters in Uttarakhand and Himachal show that Indian States face the same hazards. A pool that pays quickly on satellite triggers would stabilise annual Indian disaster spending too, which the writer notes as a benefit. Framed this way, India would be not a donor under pressure but a member protecting itself, which is politically easier at home and more credible abroad. The geopolitical cost of an evasive reply is also real: the article notes that China is stepping up its climate outreach across the Himalayas.

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