Submit your Article

As global leaders gather at COP30 in Brazil to negotiate finance, adaptation, and loss and damage, Nepal’s 2025 monsoon season offers a stark reminder of why climate-vulnerable countries need stronger recognition and support. From slow-onset droughts in the plains to catastrophic glacial floods and colossal landslides in the mountains, Nepal’s experience illustrates how climate variability is already inflicting deep human, economic, and ecological losses—despite the country’s negligible contribution to global emissions. 

According to the German Watch’s Climate Risk Index 2025, Nepal averages nearly 250 deaths annually from climate-related disasters, with roughly 75,840 people directly affected each year. The economic cost of such events is also substantial, amounting to an estimated $221.3m—or 0.258 percent of the national GDP—underscoring the persistent human and financial toll of climate-induced hazards

Nepal’s 2025 monsoon opened with extended dry conditions across Southern plains; mainly Madhes Province, where rainfall from June to mid-July fell to less than one-third of normal levels during the critical paddy transplantation period. With worsening soil moisture and visible crop stress, the provincial government declared drought on July 24. Yet only weeks later, it brought severe downpours mainly across Madhes, inundating ripening paddy fields and low-lying settlements and causing damage worth billions of rupees. The abrupt shift from drought to heavy flood within the same season is emblematic of climate-driven rapid extremes now harming smallholder farmers who lack buffers to absorb repeated shocks.

The situation intensified even after the official monsoon withdrawal. Multiple post-monsoon rain systems—amplified by two unexpected but powerful cyclones on Oct 4-5 and again on Oct 30-31—brought extreme rainfall during Nepal’s peak harvest season, destroying crops of billions rupees worth, stored grain, and essential infrastructure. These late-season events have heightened national anxiety about Nepal’s changing monsoon behaviour and the possibility of more frequent cyclone-linked hazards in the future.

High-altitude regions faced even more severe climate-induced damage. Amid lingering fears from last year’s catastrophic Thame incident in the Khumbu region, Nepal faced another shock on 8 July when a transboundary glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), originating in China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, surged into Rasuwa District through Bhote Koshi river. It killed 10 people, left 19 missing, destroyed the Rasuwagadhi friendship bridge, damaged hydropower facilities, flattened the dry port, swept away cargo trucks, and disrupted cross-border trade. Losses were estimated at Rs 2.5bn, and insurance claims reached nearly Rs 1bn. For Nepal, this event underscored the country’s exposure to hazards that originate beyond its borders—a key issue Nepal continues to raise at COP30 within the global Loss and Damage framework.

Beyond infrastructure losses, climate-induced non-economic damages—psychosocial stress, displacement, health impacts, lost educational days, and erosion of cultural and natural heritage—remain largely unaddressed in national relief systems. These burdens fall disproportionately on women, elderly residents, low-income families, and indigenous communities, widening existing inequalities and undermining long-term resilience.

Despite these mounting challenges, Nepal is also making notable progress in reducing human casualties. The 2025 monsoon spanned 135 days—longer than average, with onset on May 29 and withdrawal on Oct 10—bringing near-normal rainfall yet resulting in significantly fewer deaths and injuries than in previous years. Disaster incidents fell by 32 percent, deaths by 70 percent, and affected households nearly halved. These gains reflect improved forecasting, stronger institutional coordination led by NDRRMA, and community-level preparedness also supported by the development partners at local level. 

Madhes Province demonstrated how accessible warning systems can directly reduce loss and damage. SMS alerts, radio updates, and volunteer networks enabled households to protect livestock, food stocks, and essential assets. While economic losses were considerable, no fatalities were recorded—underscoring the life-saving value of localized, people-centered early warning systems. Similarly, in the downstream areas of Karnali, flood early warning mechanisms proved crucial in minimizing both human and property losses. Development partners, under Climate Resilience Measures for Community (CRMC) projects, working with national authorities and local communities, strengthened both the hardware—such as flood and rainfall sensors—and the software components, including community awareness and emergency preparedness. Together, these interventions showed that timely information and local readiness remain Nepal’s strongest defense against escalating climate risks

Across municipalities, bamboo-based bio-dykes, riverbank reinforcement, sandbagging, and pre-positioned emergency supplies helped prevent larger-scale devastation. These low-cost, community-driven measures highlight the importance of social capital and local knowledge in resilience-building.

However, substantial vulnerabilities persist. Ilam recorded the highest fatalities (39). Rasuwa suffered catastrophic economic losses. Trekking corridors and high-altitude settlements still lack reliable communication networks, leaving residents and tourists without timely warnings. And the increasing frequency of post-monsoon cyclone-driven rain systems threatens the stability of Nepal’s agricultural calendar.

Why COP30 must acknowledge Nepal’s climate reality

Despite Nepal’s minimal emission yet timely National Determined Contribution (NDC) submission along with Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) stating its full commitment to carbon neutrality by 2045, the country continues to face severe climate-induced loss and damage. The new Loss & Damage Fund at COP30 is promising, but predictable, accessible finance is urgently needed to protect communities bearing the brunt of crises they did not create.

Key questions for COP30: Who is responsible for escalating losses? How can vulnerable nations access reliable funding for preparedness and recovery? How can non-economic losses—culture, health, education—be addressed?

Nepal’s experiences with glacial lake outburst floods, drought–flood cycles, and cyclone-linked extremes show that adaptation alone is insufficient. Policy priorities include community-based monitoring, risk-informed land-use planning with phased relocation, nature-based solutions, and integrating non-economic losses into planning.

The 2025 monsoon is a stark reminder: those least responsible for climate change are suffering the most. Ensuring Nepal’s concerns are acted upon is essential for a fair, resilient, and climate-just future.

The last few generations have grown up believing that schools are places of learning while prisons are popularly perceived as stations of punishment eventually intended for improvisation or reformation. Despite having clear and unassailable distinctions, if we look closely, the line between the two sometimes feels blurred these days; and, sadly, the first is inheriting qualities of the latter. Globally, prisons are now being proactively reimagined as reform centers, but our schools, ironically, are increasingly resembling as sites of sentencing or tantamount to quasi-prisons.

Government and community schoolteachers in the nation are often and repeatedly protesting, inter alia, on demand of professional growth and security while nearly 7.5m students are grappling for the commendable academic characters and conducts. Some semi-possessed reporting from the government agencies confirm that—among schoolable children—around 60 percent flow to government schools and the rest in private ones, which are mushrooming from major thoroughfares to every nook and corners of cities plus suburbs. 

In cities, however, nearly 80 percent of children are boarded in private institutions. For parents willing to enroll their wards in privately-owned schools, choosing it becomes one of the stressful decisions, often driven by convenience, family relocation, standard complex or peer pressure. Schools, meanwhile, compete with one another through flashy banners, glossy advertisements and promises of modern facilities, quality education, holistic development and myriads of other magnificent commitments. An ingrained obsession of presenting self as bigger and better schools has been an indefensibly burdensome luxury that many are professedly proclaiming. Nonetheless, most of the claims are mere meaningless myths.  

Meaningless myth

A dangerous misconception has taken root and often been tough to be chopped out: the idea that schools with skyrocketing buildings, multiplexes, exorbitant fees, techno-driven show-ups, lifts and swimming pools and larger enrollments are automatically the best. In truth, the smaller the class size, the greater the attention a child receives, and the more effective the learning goes. Schools should be foundations, carefully laying down habits and curiosity. 

Universities, by contrast, are where specialized and collective mass learning happens. At the very crude stage of experiencing academic milieu and joy, many schools are pompously heading to burden the fresh cum immature minds with unreasonable overloads that ultimately rankles them remarkably in regular course of their later academic entourage. Learning in the first phase of schooling in home-spawn context and language may be pretty easy and evidently doable as well.

Contrary to the utmost sense, many schools are distorting pre-supposed fine-tuned balance by utterly overburdening children with an obsession for English from the very earliest grades. Language is important, but it is only a medium—not the destination. What truly matters is the ability to think, to reason, to feel, to conceptualize and to cognate. Instead of nurturing these qualities, some schools prioritize rote memorization of English words, producing students who may sound fluent but lack critical and creative thoughts. The eventual outcome is mere English-murmuring machines, not independent thinkers.

Another problem lies in the weight of expectations—sometimes literally. In many cases, the schoolbag of almost all children is almost as heavy as the children themselves. Exacerbating the situation, countless textbooks and impractically time-consuming overload of homework have turned learning into drudgery and have even disturbingly occupied the parents in most cases.

Students who are deprived of adequate rest, who are frightened of not completing assignments or who equate school with fear are unlikely to develop a lifelong love of learning. Surveys show that parents often end up helping their children late into the night, feeding them as they scribble homework. Schools that pile on such busy work are not raising resilient learners but anxious children who see school as a place of punishment rather than discovery. The balance between envisioning, expectation and experience is quite brittle.

Brittle balance 

What is forgotten is that true education extends beyond classrooms and assignments. Expected academic growth and shrewd sense also stems from simple conversations with parents, sharing what one has learnt, playing with friends, helping at home, joining in community life and creatively engaging into disseminating their learning among pals and parents. These activities not only strengthen academic foundations but also foster mental health and social maturity. Unfortunately, many private schools have remained deliberately indifferent and malignant to accept the fact and adopt the appropriate mechanism in this front. 

Adding to the burden, the culture of multitasking mania has been a perishing pleasure. After long school hours, children are often pushed into music, dance, drawing, karate, swimming, horse riding—even archery—without any thought for their actual interests or capacities. Parents, eager to provide everything, risk overwhelming their children in the process. For some, the exhaustion begins with the time commute: hours on a bus to and from school. Fatigue alone can kill curiosity to a great extent. 

Many such things posed and impulsively prescribed to children are proscribing the natural growth, usual mastery and expected smartness. In fact, deposited anticipations are stymied and unknowingly preempted.  

Ironically, earlier generations who began as average students often grew stronger over time. Through gradual self-learning and hard work, they matured by the time higher education determined their career avenues. They knew the value of effort and were motivated to succeed evidently at the level which would capaciously contribute to the projected processional path.

Today, many students are excessively overloaded at the school level but they grow disillusioned when reaching university. In fact, many are found to have fully lost the energy, interest, aura and passion for learning given the pressure and stress in schools. The crucial stage of education meant to shape their professions receives them burnt-out, lax and indifferent. Statistics show students excelling at school but increasingly faltering in higher education, eventually leveling out as average in professional life.

The world’s best education systems share a common trait: school learning is easy, natural and enjoyable. Rigorous hard work comes later, but the school years prioritize growth in line with a child’s natural rhythm. A stone house may appear plain but is sturdy, hygienic and lasting; a glass palace may dazzle but is fragile and fleeting. Flashy, expensive, “hi-fi” schooling is the glass palace—grand in appearance, obviously unsustainable in reality.

Time to reflect

As parents, everyone must pause. Each ought to question: are we sending children to schools that nurture curiosity, resilience and social maturity? Or are we, perhaps unintentionally, placing them in educational prisons—burdened by books, trapped by homework and locked in a cycle of anxiety?

The answer depends not on how tall the building is or how expensive the fees are, but on how well the school balances academic rigor with natural growth, creativity and humanity. Are we schooling our wards on fashion or mission? The reality is that learners are grounded rather than growing, by and large.

Simara has remained tense for a couple of days, giving an indication of turmoil in Madhesh province as Nepal takes not-so-certain steps toward national elections slated for March 5 next year. The CPN-UML had plans to organize an ‘awakening campaign’ in the city located in Bara district but it did not go well with GenZers. On Wednesday, those wanting to organize the campaign clashed with those opposed to it, leaving a couple of GenZers injured.

On Thursday, as a group identifying themselves as GenZers hit the streets of Simara against the police’s ‘failure’ to arrest UML cadres involved in Wednesday’s clash on the basis of their complaint, police used force to disperse them and imposed a curfew. There’s no denying that everyone has the right to protest—and to counter-protest—but the ‘show of strength’ has to be peaceful. What’s more, a protest should not cause inconveniences to others in a democracy worth its name. As the good ole GB Shaw says: Your freedom ends where my nose begins.    

But protesters in our country take these things f0r granted and choose to bring life to a halt, which goes against the letter and spirit of our Constitution and makes a mockery of the rule of law.   According to Article 17(2)(b) of the 2015 Constitution of Nepal, every citizen has the freedom to assemble peaceably and without arms. 

While every outfit has the right to organize its programs peacefully, the host community also has the right to express its disinterest toward such programs and even bar them. In this day and age of information technology, knowledge and information are just a click away and people are generally ‘awake’. This means politicians do not need to take long flights or rough and tumble rides across Nepal all too often to sermon them on several things under the sun and beyond in a typical Panchayati fashion.

What’s more, a significant chunk of the national population appears tired of the old political parties and even their new leaders, thanks to thriving corruption, bad governance, nepotism, the lack of rule of law and chronic political instability over the decades. The loss of mass appeal for the big parties is no good tiding in a democracy, especially in view of the fact that new political forces have not become strong enough to replace the old ones.

Against this backdrop, time has perhaps come for Nepal’s political parties, especially those with the prefix ‘major’ attached to them, to come up with new ways of communicating with the masses that are in sync with changing times and a fast-changing technological landscape.

Having said this, forces across the political spectrum should develop a habit of hearing each other out and desist from suppressing dissent with a brute force to avert the kind of colossal losses that we as a nation suffered on Sept 8 and 9. Moreover, barring parties from organizing their programs will not create a conducive environment for the national elections. The sooner the political forces—and the government—realise this, the better.

Nepali Congress is yet to resolve the general convention issue that has gripped the party for more than two months. While General Secretary Gagan Kumar Thapa remains determined to hold the convention before the elections, fears of a possible party split continue to grow. If a special general convention is held as demanded by 54 convention representatives, the likelihood of a split cannot be ruled out.

Initially, party president Sher Bahadur Deuba appeared positive about holding the convention before the elections. However, after returning from Singapore where he underwent treatment, his stance has noticeably hardened. Meanwhile, around half a dozen senior leaders have begun openly criticizing Thapa and Bishwa Prakash Sharma for creating troubles within the party. Amid these tensions, the NC is failing to articulate a clear position on the elections.

In an effort to find a way out, Thapa and senior leader Shekhar Koirala held consultations this week. Still, due to ongoing disagreements over the convention, the Central Working Committee meeting has once again been postponed until Saturday. Despite several rounds of talks between Deuba and Thapa, no breakthrough has emerged.

As intra-party uncertainty persists, the broader election atmosphere remains unsettled. Yet Prime Minister Sushila Karki has sounded increasingly confident about holding elections on schedule. Responding to CPN-UML’s demand for parliament restoration, she warned that attempts to revive Parliament could complicate the situation further. In a pointed message to UML, she said: “Even after the election has been announced, the confusion seen on the sidelines of politics within some parties, the demand for the reinstatement of Parliament, and the act of questioning the legitimacy of the government could once again push the nation into a cycle of instability… If one now chooses to take a stance in favor of reinstating Parliament, it only confirms an attempt to repeat the political mishap of the past.”

On Nov 19, Karki held discussions with representatives of the 125 political parties registered with the Election Commission, attempting to reassure them that elections will take place on time. Nevertheless, UML has officially decided to file cases at the Supreme Court demanding Parliament’s restoration.

Amid the legislative vacuum, the government is preparing to issue ordinances to ease appointments to constitutional bodies without parliamentary hearings. However, if the President endorses these ordinances, they are likely to draw widespread criticism, and may face legal challenges.

Adding to the volatility, the clash between GenZ protesters and UML cadres in Bara district marks a serious development. It comes at a time when political parties are already expressing concerns over the security environment for the elections. Many fear that similar incidents could escalate during the campaign period. In this context, a group led by Sudan Gurung is demanding the resignation of Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal and calling for the arrest of former prime minister KP Sharma Oli. Meanwhile, UML is preparing to stage large-scale protests in Kathmandu.

Parallel to this, efforts are underway to formalize a document between the government and various GenZ groups to institutionalize the Sept 8-9 protests. Around 40 GenZ groups have submitted demands to the government. While the current government, which rose to power on the wave of those protests, supports legitimizing the movement, major political parties continue to resist the idea.

Within UML, internal tensions are also intensifying. Chairman Oli has dismissed the possibility of handing over leadership to new leaders, even blocking former president Bidya Devi Bhandari’s potential return by scrapping her membership. Yet Bhandari’s influence remains significant. Senior leader Ishwar Pokharel, who enjoys her backing, is preparing to challenge Oli in the upcoming general convention. Bhandari has been actively meeting UML leaders who favor a leadership change.

Similarly, UML leader Yogesh Bhattarai has grown increasingly vocal about the need for new leadership. Several senior leaders fear the party will face major losses if it contests elections under Oli’s stewardship.

In the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), instability is also deepening. High-profile leaders Sumana Shrestha and Santosh Pariyar have already left, and reports suggest others may follow. The party’s push to secure the release of its chairman Rabi Lamichhane has been unsuccessful, and in his absence, leadership disputes have intensified. Although the GenZ movement was expected to strengthen the party, internal conflict has instead weakened it further.

On the law-and-order front, the government has arrested controversial businessman Durga Prasai on charges of disrupting public order. Prasai, now a vocal proponent of monarchy and a Hindu state, had been preparing to launch street protests. Several leaders have called for his release, citing freedom of speech. A video he released, claiming Prime Minister Karki was behind the GenZ movement, has since gone viral.

Meanwhile, Netra Bikram Chand has formally registered his political party, CPN (Maoist), at the Election Commission. Unlike Pushpa Kamal Dahal of CPN (Maoist Center),  Chand has retained his Maoist ideological line. He had previously split from Dahal in 2012 alongside Mohan Baidya.

Despite the political turbulence, the Election Commission has begun preparations for the March 5 elections. It has called on parties to register themselves in order to participate.

Internationally, Nepal maintained a low-profile presence at this year’s UN climate change conference (COP), represented only at the ministerial level and with minimal civil society participation. As usual, Nepal emphasized issues related to climate justice.