Sarita Pyakurel was working in her fields on the morning of 26 August when she received a call from her nephew, who told her that a flood was coming and that she should return home.
The 48-year-old farmer had seen floods before and didn’t think much of it, assuming that even if the Trishuli River rose, the water would only reach the fields.
She was making her way back to her home in Nuwakot, which lay about 500m from the river, when she saw a torrent of water sweep the local bridge away.
Shocked and in a daze, she rushed the other way up the hill and into a nearby forest.
"We could never have imagined a flood like this," she told The New Arab. "Everyone thought it wouldn’t be very big."
On 26 August, a glacial flood that began up in the Himalayas tore through villages and towns along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers in central Nepal, causing widespread devastation. As of 15 September, more than 1,395 people have died, and another 5,130 are still missing, according to Nepali authorities.
Sarita had lived in her Nuwakot home for 34 years. She was unable to salvage anything; all she could do was watch as everything was washed away before her eyes.
"We worked for years to build our house," she said, "and it was destroyed within seconds."
The land she once knew so well had turned into a muddy, silty swamp.
Now she can no longer recognise her village, unable to point out where her house, farm, pasture, or neighbourhood used to be.
Her two sisters-in-law, aged 55 and 57, and her 20-year-old nephew were among those swept away. They are still missing.
Sarita told The New Arab she is now staying in a shelter run by her village's rural municipality, where she sleeps in a room shared with 20 others.
"We have nowhere else to go," she said, adding that she wishes the government had provided better accommodation.
A 'climate-driven disaster'
"[River] Bhotekoshi’s devastating floods, which claimed lives and destroyed homes, are a climate-driven disaster,” Dr Maheshwar Dhakal, who leads the Climate Change Management Division under Nepal’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forest and Environment, told The New Arab.
"While Nepal’s contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible, we are bearing the consequences of emissions from wealthy, industrialised nations. In that sense, we are victims of others’ actions, not our own."
According to glaciologist Dr Rijan Bhakta Kayastha, global warming is heating the Himalayas faster than most regions, accelerating glacier melt and raising the risk of more frequent and severe glacial lake outburst floods and other ice-related disasters.
Between 1990 and 2020, glaciers in the Himalayas and the nearby Hindu Kush range contracted in area by approximately 12%, contributing to a total ice-thickness loss of about 24 meters since 1974, according to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.
Researchers who reviewed 493 floods caused by bursting glacial lakes up to 2024 found that the risk of these outbursts is exacerbated by climate change.
They found that the number of glacial lake outburst floods has jumped fivefold since 1950, from an average of 7 per decade to 38, and flagged 407 glacial lakes as potentially dangerous and at risk of bursting.
A disaster-prone country
Nepal is no stranger to climate catastrophe.
In April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake triggered an ice-and-rock avalanche that buried Langtang village, killing around 300 people.
A decade later, on 8 July 2025, the bursting of a temporary glacial lake in Tibet unleashed a surge of water down the Lhende Khola River, killing at least nine people and sweeping away the Miteri Bridge on the Nepal–China border.
Less than a month later, on 30 July, the Bhotekoshi River flooded, damaging roads and other infrastructure along the same corridor.
Initial assessments showed that the latest flood had damaged 7,570 private homes, 48 government buildings, 18 schools, and seven health facilities, affecting roughly 84,270 people across six districts.
The deluge also devastated hydropower infrastructure, damaging multiple projects and reducing generation capacity by 431 MW — approximately 10% of Nepal’s total output.
An analysis by the Kathmandu-based think tank Change Initiative estimated preliminary losses at between $1.38 and $ 2.70 billion, roughly equivalent to 4% of Nepal’s GDP.
A climate funding gap
Experts said the August 2026 Bhotekoshi–Trishuli disaster was not just a natural shock — it was the predictable outcome of a long-standing climate finance gap.
For years, Nepal’s efforts to adapt to the worst effects of climate change have been constrained by insufficient and fragmented financing, leaving the country without the systems needed to protect people living in the path of glacier- and flood-related hazards.
Nepal has received only about $400 million in total climate finance to date.
But its government estimates it will need roughly $46 billion by 2030 alone to implement its National Adaptation Plan to adapt to the expected effects of climate change, such as floods, landslides, and similar disasters.
This leaves a shortfall of around $45.6 billion, meaning the country’s climate finance needs are more than 100 times what it has received so far.
Furthermore, 61% of the climate finance Nepal receives is in the form of loans, deepening its debt even as climate impacts escalate.
This funding model severely limits support on the ground.
A key $49.9 million project aimed at protecting 2.4 million people in glacial river basins, such as Sarita's community, has only $9.2 million — all of which was disbursed to the UNDP for early-warning and risk-reduction activities.
Global safety nets offer little relief when disasters strike. By July 2026, 119 countries had filed funding requests totalling $2.8 billion with the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), but only $342 million was available for its active pilot phase.
The Fund, established at COP27 in Egypt, has been pledged $822 million by donor nations but has received only $485 million.
The erosion of international support
Alongside the funding gap, vital international support is being rapidly withdrawn.
The SERVIR–Hindu Kush Himalaya initiative, a USAID-funded regional hub that provided critical satellite data and tools for disaster monitoring across the region, was “formally concluded” in January 2025 following a stop-work notice from the United States, despite its contract running till the end of 2026.
A few days after the flood, former USAID official Jeremy Konyndyk noted that DOGE-led actions "killed $420m worth of climate work at NASA" and, in the process, cancelled all seven Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) projects in Nepal — dismantling early warning mechanisms that could have alerted farmers like Pyakurel before the waters rose.
Birendra Bajracharya, former director of the SERVIR-HKH project, told The New Arab that "funding cuts had stalled efforts to improve avalanche situational awareness during heavy rainfall."
"The work to detect slope speeds for avalanche forecasting also could not be completed," he added.
The programme was identifying areas at risk of glacier lake outburst floods so downstream communities could better prepare for potential disasters. Then Donald Trump cut its funding.
Closely watching USAID funding cuts, Dr Ramesh Poudel, Associate Professor in the Central Department of Economics, said that the recent USAID cuts have eroded Nepali trust in America, despite Nepal’s significant contributions of manpower to the United States.
According to him, thousands of Nepalis have worked as security guards, drivers, cooks and base‑support staff for private contractors supporting US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nepali doctors, nurses and other health workers are employed in US hospitals and care facilities; many other Nepalis in the United States work in informal and low‑wage sectors.
"Imported development and parasitic consciousness do not always benefit us. We must become self-reliant," he said.
Dr Ramesh warned that when international aid is abruptly halted, existing projects collapse and progress is set back by a decade, because Nepal has historically outsourced its development. Filling the massive funding gaps left by the US withdrawal remains highly unlikely in the near term, he explained.
"Climate finance must fund technology and capacity-building across all three pillars — mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage," Raju Pandit Chhetri, Executive Director of Prakriti Resource Centre, told The New Arab.
"Mitigation avoids or reduces greenhouse gas emissions; adaptation helps communities adjust to a changing climate; and when adaptation is no longer possible, as in the Bhotekoshi flood, the result is loss and damage."
Raju said that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement oblige developed countries to provide climate finance to developing nations, which have contributed far less to the crisis, face its worst impacts, and have the least capacity to respond.
"From a climate justice perspective, climate finance must therefore flow from developed to developing countries and be implemented effectively," he added.
Uttam Babu Shrestha, director of the Global Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (GIIS), told The New Arab that developing countries have made climate-finance promises they haven’t kept, and the money they pledged has largely not materialised.
"Even the money that’s available is hard to access, while our needs keep growing dramatically. Because mitigation efforts in developed countries have fallen behind, temperatures are rising, and climate impacts are worsening," he said.
'The real solution is to cut carbon emissions;
An Oxfam report from May 2026 showed that developing countries will need about $2.4 trillion per year in climate investment by 2030, rising to roughly $3.2-3.3 trillion per year by 2035 to meet the Paris Agreement and development goals.
Yet adaptation remains severely underfunded, and finance for loss and damage is still largely uncosted and poorly tracked.
Wealthier nations frequently overstate their climate finance contributions by using ambiguous reporting rules and counting loans at full face value.
Many climate finance providers adopt a risk-averse approach.
Consequently, around 90% of climate finance is directed toward middle-income, high-emission countries, leaving lower-income, fragile, and conflict-affected nations with only a fraction of the funding they need.
"The key point is that we’re not looking to the Western world to solve all our problems. Some things can be funded from our own budget and the private sector," Raju said.
Climate analyst Manjeet Dhakal said that the real challenge is staying true to the international climate process, honouring what countries have agreed to and responding to the needs and courage of future generations.
"The real solution is to cut carbon emissions. If we keep emitting carbon, climate disasters will only get worse. Climate finance can help us cope in the short term, but it doesn’t solve the root problem; it just delays it," Manjeet said.
He added that reaching out to the climate finance community isn’t about handing out money to vulnerable communities.
"It’s about enabling them to live with dignity, continue their education, and access rehabilitation and other essential support," he stated.
For people like Sarita Pyakurel, the climate finance debate is not just about figures on a balance sheet — it’s about whether the international system can turn its promises into meaningful support for people like her.
She has felt the effects of disaster more than most.
Nepal’s 2015 earthquake destroyed her home, the 2025 floods wiped away her fields, and this latest deluge carried away what she had left.
"I do not know where to turn," she said.
Sunita Neupane is an independent investigative journalist based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She specialises in high-impact reporting on human rights, public health, and climate justice
This story was produced in collaboration with Egab