UNITED NATIONS, United States—Nepal’s disastrous floods last month “was a warning to the world” about the mounting dangers of climate change, Prime Minister Balendra Shah told the United Nations on Thursday, encouraging countries to step up to help his country adapt.
Addressing the General Assembly in sunglasses during its high-level week, Shah stated that a changing climate was “destabilising the fragile Himalayan ecology,” melting permafrost and glaciers, and accelerating dangers.
Late last month, the country was hit by one of its greatest disasters in history: a tsunami-like deluge caused by a high-altitude glacier mountain collapse along the Nepal-China border. More than 1,400 people killed, 6,000 are still missing, and the economic damage is in the billions of dollars.
World Weather Attribution scientists classified the event as a “compound crisis” in which local geological instability mixed with long-term warming drove glacier retreat and permafrost thaw. Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. We did not cause this catastrophe, but we are suffering for it,” he explained.
Shah encouraged the international community to share the cost of helping his country adapt to climate change, saying, “Nepal cannot build resilience alone against a crisis made worse by the failure of global governance.”
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