Post Bhotekoshi-Trishuli flood, discourse about climate justice and financing has significantly hogged the city discussions, social media feeds and any other sort of communication portals. Debates have been revitalized and have gained scores of momentum as nerve-chilling damages are witnessed in terms of lives, livelihoods, properties, infrastructures, socio-ecosystems and other associated networks. Lives are mercilessly washed and swept to brute death, recorded missing graph is high, even those who barely managed to remain alive are left with acute meagre and absolutely impecunious or pauper status. Cities and settlements are rendered extremely uninhabitable. Sordid and dismal dismay and bitterly deepening deprivations can be sensed in affected ranges across the river basins in disaster plagued districts.
The way voices are being unequivocally echoed from all well-wishers and sympathizers to bring the devastation in attention of key culprits and cardinally responsible agents can draw less of desiring outcomes compared to heaping public consumption and oodles of solidarity. No one serves the initiation with flak but fuels with bamboozling apathy or inaction to process it. Bhotekoshi blight, in burnt of climate change, obviously spawns deluge or surge of sympathy but certainly experiences obliviousness or seemingly apparent dismissal in repose on robust claim for reparation or compensation.
There is no acute shortage and grim paucity of evidently documented and formalized international conventions or covenants to respond to the damages. Undoubtedly, few International Laws and associated instruments raise optimism and hint slim chance or faint hope of receiving damage response. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) under the UN Climate Regime can be considered as the most practical gateway to process required coordination and aspiring appeal ahead. However, this mechanism is assumed for support and cooperation rather than legally framed for post-damage compensation, as often remarked by the students having specialization in international laws.
Further, Article 8 of Paris Agreement recognizes the urgency and importance of addressing the climate-change induced fatalities but fails to mandate categorical basis for required redressal or liability for compensation. Provisions in these agreements foster to lodge the request but apparently limit from suing any other on claiming upon the cost. The International Court of Justice has enshrined a landmark verdict on 23 July 2025 with an advisory on climate change to integrate climate treaties with customary International Laws however expected effective advancement in the course is suffering a sluggish pace and substantive setback till now. Warsaw International Mechanism too can showcase a thin possibility to enroute the claim.
The International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA: articles 31, 34 and 36) can be attracted to supplement the demand. Few more human right treaties and or environment/ biodiversity laws can be tended to compound the gravity of voice. Altogether less than half dozens of international instruments can be located and surfaced for the purpose.
Despite having few instruments to activate and actuate, the real hassle hails as most of them are not universally ratified and honored. One or other countries are willfully denying and consistently vilifying the agreements. The US president is openly recounting and has objected loud and clear to the Paris Agreement and reiterated his detachment from it.
Though most of aforementioned regulations express good faith about necessity to respond to the losses and damages, those have yet not defined proper processing for claim, assessments, review, compensations and other allied procedural modus-operandi.
The next pressing question is who will be assessing the destruction? How can it be reasonably calibrated or computed? Properties can be measured in monetary units. How about losses of lives, most precious but never redeemable in any way. The injury of livelihood life-line to remaining alive, stress and trauma, networks and loss of impending or imminent opportunities, cost of separation from loved ones and kin and many more can’t be measured accurately. Most of these aspects are incomparable and in-compensable as well.
Even if the damage can be calculated to some extent, will third parties really tally the impairment to the extent our nation has been aggrieved? Will other-parties solely agree on a self-claimed assessment sheet of damage? Let’s assume the damage assessment sheet will be entertained, who shall be responsible for indemnification? There has been no such exclusive loss and damage response in record till now despite other forms of assistance are usually noticed.
The Pakistan flood of 2022 can be considered as a distant precedent which received flow of assistance models in multiple forms i.e. insurance reimbursement, relief support, soft loans, concessional financing, donations and so on from one or more gateways. Rather than any International Body, the support of approximately $11bn was pledged then processed by several institutions and governments. Unfortunately, none was specified as Loss and Damage Fund as we have been often craving to claim for. The burgeoning blight of the move may be that conditions to qualify and implement any funds even if received might be proposed so complex, cumbersome and procedurally retarding, we barely hold grit only to voluntarily surrender it.
Moreover, monetary compensation is not justice at all. Not to have damaged or harm only ensures naturally automated justice. Post-harm compensation or relief are mere means to harmonize the bonding but can’t restate the situation prior to damage status. Renowned classical philosopher Plato, in his book Republic, clearly mentions that Justice is absence of loss or prevention of damage not an attempt to heal the damage with other responses. Whatever scale of compensation is extended, no capacity can bring back the lost lives and restore the same lives in the destroyed river basins.
Thus, the overly romanticized discourse of claim for carbon financing or climate justice is only a double-barrel fallacy: a) neither it seems to be processed fairly due to cumbersome procedural laxity and processing confusion, b) nor any attempts, though hailed, really ensures actual justice.
