{"id":1014,"date":"2026-09-08T14:37:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2026-09-08T14:37:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:37:38","slug":"a-reckoning-comes-for-nepal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1014","title":{"rendered":"A Reckoning Comes for Nepal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On a Monday in mid-April, I walked through the informal settlement in the Thapathali neighborhood of Kathmandu, situated on the banks of the sacred, flood-prone, and sewage-filled Bagmati River. The sights were familiar. I\u2019d visited the decades-old community of about 150 poor and landless families two years earlier while reporting on riverside slums that were facing threats of forced eviction and increasingly frequent and ferocious floods.<\/p>\n

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This time I was just passing through, retracing a route through the Bagmati\u2019s dense urban corridor, its riverfront alternating between informal settlements, high-end apartments, shiny office complexes, and sleekly designed parks with pedestrian paths beside the fouled river. The pricey new buildings often loom over the slum dwellings like a taunt.<\/p>\n

There are many such informal settlements across the Kathmandu Valley\u2019s chaotic urban sprawl, and they\u2019re home to tens of thousands of people. Across the country, there are at least a million informal settlers. Many are internal migrants to the cities from rapidly depopulating rural districts, fleeing droughts, floods, landslides, and poverty. (Roughly one in five Nepalis live below the official poverty line of less than $1.50 a day.) Because these families occupy public property, the government and many Nepalis call them \u201csquatters.\u201d<\/p>\n

That day in Thapathali, I paused to chat with a young father who stood in the doorway of his improvised home. Five days later, by the evening of April 25, that home and the entire Thapathali settlement\u2014along with other settlements in Kathmandu Valley\u2014were gone. On the orders of the recently elected prime minister, Balendra \u201cBalen\u201d Shah, bulldozers leveled the community, with thousands of armed security personnel, including national police and the Nepali Army, enforcing the evictions. The government gave the residents 24 hours\u2019 notice\u2014at most. Households scrambled to save what belongings they could. Thousands of people were moved to hastily prepared and ill-equipped temporary holding centers, where they waited for a promised resettlement plan. Many more simply fled, fearful of the authorities. In all, according to advocates for the landless, more than 2,800 households and close to 17,000 people were displaced. At least five people have died because of the evictions.<\/p>\n

The razing of the riverside settlements was one of the first initiatives of Shah\u2019s premiership. In March, he had swept into office on a wave of hope and change after last September\u2019s Gen Z uprising and the ensuing violence. His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) had won almost two-thirds of the vote in the snap elections\u2014unprecedented in Nepal\u2019s 30-year history of unstable parliamentary democracy\u2014and then, in April, Shah exploited widespread anti-squatter (and anti-poor) sentiment for populist effect. As the mayor of Kathmandu from 2022 until this past winter, he had tried and failed to demolish the Thapathali settlement without regard for due process, but he was met with fierce resistance on the streets and, ultimately, was stopped by the High Court pending a government resettlement plan. This time, as prime minister, he moved with overwhelming force\u2014and without any such plan.<\/p>\n

The evictions dominated headlines and social media for weeks in April and May and were cheered by Shah\u2019s middle-class fan base. But prominent members of Nepali civil society decried the campaign, calling out Shah\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian\u201d disregard for the rule of law and \u201cgrave violation of basic human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I saw from my vantage point was all of that and more. One of the justifications for the mass evictions, offered by Shah in a social-media post (his preferred means of communication), was to rescue the riverside residents from the deadly floods, as if he had only their welfare in mind\u2014and not the real-estate developers eyeing the city\u2019s riverfront. What I saw, in other words, was the fraught intersection of climate change, social justice, and human rights. To be sure, the people of these riverside communities should be moved out of harm\u2019s way and provided safe and secure housing\u2014but only through a legal process, established under Nepali and international law, of consultation and mutually agreed-upon resettlement options, with plenty of notice before eviction. Not bulldozers at dawn and decades-old neighborhoods reduced to rubble and the debris of precarious lives.<\/p>\n

There is a tendency among advocates, especially in the Global North, to talk about global climate justice in terms that are abstract and idealized, disconnected from the social and political realities within specific countries. In Nepal, efforts to implement meaningful climate-adaptation policies at scale have long been stymied not only by a lack of money and institutional capacity but by the political instability and endemic corruption of the revolving coalition governments ruled by the three major legacy parties for the past three decades. The political earthquake in September, combined with the RSP\u2019s election sweep in March, seemed to offer the possibility of a new era\u2014a new generation of leaders who might transform Nepal\u2019s governance and make real progress. But the reality is far more complicated.<\/p>\n

If \u201cclimate justice\u201d is to mean anything in places like Nepal, where catastrophe is already unfolding, it will depend as much on conditions on the ground as on the amount of funding for adaptation and climate-related \u201closs and damage\u201d that may or may not materialize through the United Nations and other geopolitical processes. Climate justice will have to be fought for\u2014and equality and human rights will have to be won\u2014not only among <\/em>countries but within<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

The week before Shah\u2019s bulldozers rolled into the riverside settlements, I sat with two landless women in the informal settlement on the Manohara River, near Kathmandu\u2019s Tribhuvan International Airport. The women, members of Nepal\u2019s Dalit community (that is, \u201cuntouchables\u201d), told me about their struggles, not least with water\u2014both flooding and scarcity.<\/p>\n

The elder of the two, 67-year-old Shanti Devi, migrated from western Nepal and had lived in the community for more than 20 years. She spoke about purchasing drinking water in large jugs, while those who can\u2019t afford them queue up at 4 am at the free public water tap 45 minutes away. \u201cYou have to wait for three to four hours,\u201d she said. \u201cThere used to be a large amount of water; now it is only a small amount.\u201d The younger woman, Karun, a 31-year-old mother of two, told me about a flood three years ago that inundated her home: \u201cEverything was lost\u2014the children\u2019s books, clothes, food\u2014because of the huge mud inside the house.\u201d It took 15 days to clean out the house with the help of neighbors, while family members fell ill with fevers and skin ailments. \u201cI was only able to save my life and my children\u2019s lives,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

When I asked Karun what she thought of Shah and the new government, she was surprisingly sanguine. \u201cWe are hopeful that he is not going to evict us,\u201d she said, unaware of what was to come. \u201cIf the government evicts us, where will we go? How will we survive?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nepal is among the foremost places on earth where some of humanity\u2019s poorest and most marginalized are living on a knife-edge of climate breakdown and sociopolitical polycrisis. That describes much of the Global South, of course, but Nepal is uniquely situated not only geopolitically, between India and China, but geographically, as the central and iconic Himalayan nation, where the Indo-Gangetic Plain transitions into the Himalayan foothills. Indeed, the plains and hills make up most of Nepal\u2019s territory and are home to the vast majority of its roughly 30 million people (a population about the size of Texas\u2019s or Venezuela\u2019s).<\/p>\n

The Nepali people now face an accelerating climate emergency on multiple fronts. Disastrous river flooding is just one facet of it. With climate change, it\u2019s always too much water or too little\u2014and the latter is fast becoming Nepal\u2019s new reality. From villages in the high Himalayas to urban and rural districts in the hills and plains, the country\u2019s extreme vulnerability may soon reach an inflection point in the alarming water-scarcity crisis affecting much of the population.<\/p>\n

Madhukar Upadhya is one of Nepal\u2019s leading water and environmental experts. Writing in The<\/em> Kathmandu Post<\/em>, Nepal\u2019s most widely read English-language daily, in the weeks leading up to the March election, he warned of \u201cever-escalating climate impacts\u201d amplifying the daunting economic and social challenges at the root of the country\u2019s political instability. \u201cThe earlier the aspiring leaders acknowledge that we are fast descending into this abyss of intersecting polycrisis\u2014worsened by decades of performative politics\u2014the greater our capacity to mobilize the much-needed collective action would be,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve met and spoken at length with Upadhya, who has worked on water and climate issues in the government and academia for three decades. When I reached out to him last winter about Nepal\u2019s growing water crisis, he suggested that I visit the Panchkhal Valley, a major agricultural area amid the hills east of Kathmandu that has suffered severe water scarcity over the past decade or more.<\/p>\n

The day I took a car out to Panchkhal in mid-April was warm and sunless, the air thick with the Kathmandu Valley\u2019s notorious pollution. The smog combined with a dense soup of wildfire smoke from the west, and I could barely see the other side of the steep, narrow valleys as we ascended into the hills. Once in Panchkhal\u2014the skies clearer but still hazy\u2014we stopped at the small bridge over the Jhiku Khola, its principal river, now down to a trickle, its sandy bed mostly weeds and scattered pools of water.<\/p>\n

Following a footpath between the fields beside the river, I saw that most were green with crops and new plantings, fed by irrigation water carried down ditches and pumped through long hoses. In recent years, farmers have resorted to digging deep pits in the dry riverbed from which to pump water into the parched nearby fields, but a farmer we met by the road told us that they were now using water stored on the low hill across the river. When I visited the municipality office down the road, a spokesman for the mayor\u2019s office told me they had recently created rainwater-harvesting ponds on the hill. But I could see that many fields farther from the river lay fallow and dry, and on the steep slopes at the valley\u2019s edges, most of the terraced fields, dependent entirely on rain and spring water, had been abandoned.<\/p>\n

Upadhya, who has studied the Panchkhal Valley for decades, told me how he swam in the Jhiku Khola 20 years ago, when it was already in decline but still flowing. Here was a proud agricultural community that had once supplied the largest share of Kathmandu\u2019s vegetables, Upadhya said, its future now uncertain. Food production, the valley\u2019s primary source of income, has declined over the years, and according to the municipal spokesman, a proposed irrigation pipeline has yet to win government support.<\/p>\n

In a remarkable series of articles over the past several years for The Kathmandu Post<\/em>, Upadhya has tried to raise the alarm on the depth and scale of the water crisis\u2014and of the climate crisis more broadly\u2014and to rouse the country\u2019s political class into action. Pointing to a recent UN report on the imminent threat of global \u201cwater bankruptcy\u201d and its growing evidence in Nepal, Upadhya issued a grave warning: \u201cWhat was thought of as a crisis\u2014large-scale but manageable\u2014has turned into a paradigm-shattering realization of irreversible bankruptcy on a planetary scale\u2026a state where local hydrological systems have been pushed to the point of collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Nepal, as in many other places, warming temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns have led not only to drier winters in large swaths of the country and increasing pre-monsoon droughts, but also to extreme downpours. \u201cInstead of jhari<\/em>,\u201d Upadhya writes, using the Nepali term for low-intensity continuous rain, \u201cmonsoons are dominated by short-duration, high-intensity localized rain,\u201d which increases flooding while at the same time reducing the recharge of groundwater, even as its depletion surges. A of 6,500 households in every region of the country found that an eye-popping 43 percent of Nepalis have seen their local streams and rivulets dry up over the past 25 years. And when it comes to springs, 38 percent of Nepalis have seen them dry up completely, with 58 percent overall in the hills and more than 75 percent in the hardest-hit areas. That 38 percent \u201cis more than a third of the population,\u201d Upadhya told me. \u201cSo 10 million people have lost water sources already. That is serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, the monsoon arrived six weeks late in the plains, leading the government to declare a drought disaster in Madhesh, an ethnically and politically marginalized province (and Nepal\u2019s second-most-populous) on the border with India, where the shallow hand-pumped wells ubiquitous among Madheshi households had already mostly dried up. By way of response, the government sent water tankers and proposed to drill more deep-boring wells, tapping into aquifers that have already been dangerously depleted. Food production took a major hit, with approximately 10 percent of Nepal\u2019s rice-growing capacity in peril.<\/p>\n

Upadhya questions the new government\u2019s grasp of the situation and whether it \u201cpossesses the resolve to address it effectively. The hard truth,\u201d he writes, \u201cis that one cannot build a secure and prosperous future on an empty aquifer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upadhya and other experts offer a familiar list of measures to address the crisis. Writing in the Nepali Times<\/em> in May, Ngamindra Dahal, a hydrometeorologist at the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation, argues that water security is central to the country\u2019s future. Protecting water sources, he writes, \u201ccalls for sustained investment in watershed conservation, recharge ponds, soil moisture retention and community-led spring management.\u201d Even more so, the government \u201cmust stop treating water as a sector isolated from everything else.\u201d Nepal cannot stop climate change\u2014after all, it contributes just 0.1 percent of global greenhouse emissions\u2014but responding to it, Dahal writes, means \u201ctreating springs, watersheds and local water systems not as peripheral environmental concerns, but as the foundation of national resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Over a long lunch in Kathmandu\u2019s Gyaneshwor neighborhood, I asked Upadhya\u2014who is now in his 70s and a gregarious talker with decades of stories from the field\u2014what he sees as the most important things to be done at this point. \u201cThere are two things you have to understand,\u201d he said. \u201cEven if you can only stop groundwater from depleting further, that is an achievement.\u201d Second, \u201cwater is a local thing, right? Very, very local. When it rains, it\u2019s in a decentralized way, so you have to manage in a decentralized way. And only through community is it possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an example, Upadhya proposes mobilizing a nationwide grassroots effort, organized through high schools, to create tens of thousands of water-harvesting ponds throughout Nepal\u2014and educate a new generation about water. \u201cWe need to create an army of people to understand water and then act accordingly,\u201d he said. \u201cHarvesting the rain, they\u2019ll have practical, hands-on understanding of the hydrology at the ground level. When these students become leaders, you won\u2019t have to tell them the problem of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is scant evidence that Shah\u2019s administration and the RSP will prioritize the water crisis or Nepal\u2019s advancing climate emergency\u2014and on this issue, they are not much better than previous governments. In fact, the national budget presented by Finance Minister Swarnim Wagl\u00e9 in May deprioritizes climate action, as critics in the press have pointed out.<\/p>\n

One of those critics is Sonia Awale, the editor of the Nepali Times <\/em>and an accomplished climate reporter. When we met in Kathmandu, I asked her where climate fits into the new political landscape. One might think, given the way corruption and political instability were obstacles to climate policy under the old regime, that the RSP\u2019s nearly two-thirds majority, its centrist technocratic reputation, and its promise of effective governance could translate into much-needed action.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a little too early,\u201d Awale said, \u201cbut for the first time in I don\u2019t know how many years, people in Nepal are generally hopeful about everything. So I am optimistic.\u201d On climate specifically, \u201ca lot of people [within the RSP] who have advocated along these lines are now policymakers themselves. But it has to be a priority of the leadership.\u201d And at that level, she added, \u201cI\u2019m not seeing a lot of focus. The RSP\u2019s 100-point agenda does not reflect environmental issues.\u201d The government\u2019s immediate priorities are the issues that swept it into office: ending corruption, reforming the bureaucracy, jump-starting the economy, and creating jobs to address Nepal\u2019s massive out-migration of workers.<\/p>\n

Even in the best case, I asked, if the RSP and the prime minister were to focus their minds on the urgency of, say, the water crisis\u2014using it as a broad, unifying issue that touches the lives of nearly all Nepalis\u2014and were able to implement smart policy, does the country have the resources and the capacity to address climate change at scale without the long-promised international assistance for adaptation and climate-related loss and damage?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat process is very slow,\u201d Awale replied. \u201cWe simply don\u2019t have time to wait for that money. And, honestly, it is not money enough. Even if it does come through, are the people who actually need it going to get that money?\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Awale was telling me, Nepal must assume that, as a country on the front lines of climate catastrophe, it is on its own. \u201cEach country will need to prepare in their own way,\u201d she said. There are things that Nepal won\u2019t be able to do without assistance\u2014large infrastructure projects to protect highways, for example, or regional early-warning systems for catastrophic floods. But what can be done, especially at the local level, must<\/em> be done, she added. \u201cI\u2019ve seen local communities do their own thing, something as simple as rainwater harvesting or planting sugarcane\u2014which is a cash crop\u2014on the banks of the river as a natural buffer [against floods]. Those local solutions become so important\u2014and local government\u2019s role becomes so important, working directly with people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abhishek Jha is a 30-year-old political and policy analyst at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Kathmandu, where he does research and advocacy on climate, governance, and other issues. Of the many Nepali experts and activists that I\u2019ve interviewed, Jha offered one of the clearest answers to the puzzling question of why the climate emergency is not a government priority, especially given Nepal\u2019s vulnerability.<\/p>\n

\u201cClimate is not political<\/em> yet in Nepal,\u201d Jha told me. \u201cThe fulcrum of Nepali politics is socio-ethnic. If a politician or party campaigns on climate, they won\u2019t gain any traction. It has to be approached as a social issue. The social becomes the political in Nepal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jha spent a year and a half working on water scarcity and conservation in the plains of Madhesh Province, where his own family is from. \u201cIf you go and tell people in Madhesh that it is drying up\u2014heading toward large-scale desertification\u2014and if you say that the Himalayas are melting and that\u2019s why there is water scarcity, they won\u2019t understand,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to make people aware that \u2018this is your<\/em> issue\u2019\u2014this is a social-justice issue, a livelihood issue, an existence issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with local government,\u201d Jha continued, \u201cI see some organization comes and says that you should make this policy, and they make it. But people don\u2019t relate to it. The state doesn\u2019t own it. And these organizations, their work is done. But change at the ground level does not materialize in the way it should. It has to start from the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Nepal, climate advocacy comes across as \u201can academic-activist adventure,\u201d Jha told me, with conferences and dialogues held in air-conditioned hotel banquet halls. \u201cThere is a barrier that advocates have to cross. It has to be a bottom-up approach, people-driven, community-driven,\u201d so that the government cannot ignore it.<\/p>\n

Gen Z can also play a pivotal role in forcing the government to pay attention, particularly by prioritizing climate as a grassroots, social-justice issue. \u201cThe Gen Zs aren\u2019t thinking from that perspective,\u201d Jha noted. \u201cBut there is an opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Nepal lacks a strong climate-justice movement, a few Gen Z activists have been trying to elevate the issue, with mixed results. Monisha Choudhary, a 24-year-old law-school graduate from a Madheshi family who\u2019s been deeply involved with the Gen Z Movement Alliance, said they see a difficult road ahead.<\/p>\n

I caught up with Choudhary in early May, after they had just come from court, where they and other Gen Z lawyers were supporting landless-rights advocates in the legal challenges to Shah\u2019s demolition of the informal settlements. As soon as word got out in late April that the evictions were imminent, Gen Z activists sprang into action, both on the streets\u2014where they joined protests attempting to stop the destruction in Thapathali\u2014and in the courtroom.<\/p>\n

I asked Choudhary whether they and other Gen Z climate activists see the plight of the riverside settlements in the context of climate justice, and their response was direct. The week before, they told me, they had spoken at a conference of young climate activists in Pokhara. \u201cI was really, really shocked to find that the young people there did not connect human rights or climate justice with this issue. The language they used was \u2018[If you don\u2019t evict the informal settlements,] then how do you develop the country?\u2019 This is something climate activists in Nepal come up against, that you are anti-development.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels like we\u2019ve hit some sort of moral collapse,\u201d Choudhary said, \u201cthis excessive atomization where people are unable to sympathize with the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nirajan Thapaliya is the director of Amnesty International Nepal and a veteran human-rights campaigner. When I met him at his office in Kathmandu, I asked whether he sees any movement emerging that prioritizes human rights around the issue of climate adaptation and resilience to safeguard the poorest and most marginalized in Nepali society. \u201cThere is no political movement,\u201d Thapaliya told me. There is a growing awareness, he added, and climate has recently entered mainstream human-rights discussions. But the idea \u201cthat the climate crisis is fundamentally a human-rights crisis is a late realization.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is legitimate to ask what sort of climate justice may still be possible on a burning planet without a coordinated and equitable global response from the world\u2019s wealthy nations. And it may well be that the only answers will be found on the ground, one country and one people\u2019s struggle at a time.<\/p>\n

Now, with a super El Ni\u00f1o on the way riding on top of some of the highest global temperatures in recorded history, Nepal may soon face a genuine reckoning. The hope that current approaches will be enough to address the impacts, Upadhya argued in The Kathmandu Post<\/em> in June, is a \u201cdangerous illusion.\u201d Though some \u201cremain naively optimistic\u201d about the prospect of international aid that isn\u2019t coming, he writes, Nepal \u201ccannot afford to wait as climate shocks intensify. We must embrace self-reliance\u2026using what we have, where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole geopolitics has changed,\u201d Upadhya told me in Kathmandu. \u201cYou\u2019ll have less money coming from NGOs or governments. USAID is closed. And funders are reducing [grants] and putting money in their own security now.\u201d As a result, \u201ccommunity resilience is more important now than anytime in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Upadhya whether Nepal can really do this on its own. His answer, in essence: What choice do Nepalis have?<\/p>\n

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