In the wake of the recent flash flood that swept down from the Himalayas, Nepal is seeking immediate aid from a UN fund for climate loss and damage to help vulnerable families displaced by the disaster and rebuild destroyed schools and hospitals, the country’s foreign minister told Climate Home News.

“This is exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address,” Shisir Khanal said in an interview. He added that “stronger global solidarity and meaningful international support” are needed for countries like Nepal, which are facing increasingly severe climate-related disasters.

The floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and triggering a landslide that forced a torrent of water and debris to rush down the Bhote Koshi River valley, causing catastrophic impacts downstream. More than 1,300 people died and over 5,300 are still missing in the area.

Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal

Khanal described the disaster as a “Himalayan tsunami”, telling Climate Home News that early assessments suggest the roads, bridges, hydropower stations, highways and settlements it wiped out could require billions of dollars to rebuild. Reconstruction estimates by the government range between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.

The minister of foreign affairs said Nepal would not be asking the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) “to write a single check for this total amount”, explaining that the government is finalising a post-disaster assessment “to guide our broader international donor appeals”.

Nepal disaster seen as test case for fledgling fund

In reality, if Nepal does receive rapid support from the FRLD, it is likely to be a fraction of the total bill because the fund has a cap of $20 million per project and has little more than $350 million available to hand out in its initial phase.

So far its board has not approved any projects as it is still working out how to allocate its scarce resources, nor does it have a process in place to respond to sudden climate disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods or powerful storms.

On August 31, Nepal’s government sent a direct appeal for emergency grant funding to the FRLD, emphasising that “a prompt response would… demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed”.

A couple of days later, eight developing-country board members – later joined by those from small island states – signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold an extraordinary meeting to respond to Nepal’s request.

The FRLD said in a statement that the devastating impacts on the ground “underscore both the urgency and scale of need and reaffirm the fundamental purpose for which the FRLD was established”.

It added that it is “committed to approaching Nepal’s request with the urgency, compassion, and careful consideration that these difficult circumstances require, while respecting the Fund’s governing instrument and established decision-making processes”. As of Wednesday, Climate Home News understands that discussions were still ongoing.

Designing infrastructure for extreme shocks

Khanal pointed to “the unprecedented scale” of the huge flood which occurred within a matter of minutes and swept away river gauges meant to provide early warning in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, near the border with Tibet.

“You cannot easily ‘plan’ against a mountain collapsing,” he said. But the lesson, he added in written responses in English, is that “our historical baseline for infrastructure engineering is no longer sufficient”.

Building resilient infrastructure means that “hydropower projects, roads and early warning systems must be designed for extreme, unpredictable climate shocks”, he said. Another key element will be plans to better understand and protect ecosystems, he added.

The minister noted that Nepal, India and China share a common, interconnected Himalayan ecosystem and all three countries are affected by the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan mountain chain.

“Therefore, our call is for the three countries to work together to strengthen preparedness, resilience and regional cooperation,” he said.

New research from consultancy Systemiq, released on Wednesday, finds that Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, and that only around 20 of the Himalaya’s estimated 40,000 glaciers are currently monitored. India alone has 56 glacial lakes rated very high risk, it warns.

Early cross-border efforts on information-sharing

Since the same region of Nepal was hit by smaller-scale but still highly destructive flooding in 2024 and 2025, China and Nepal have stepped up efforts to cooperate in tackling glacier-related risks in the region.

In August 2025, Climate Home News reported that authorities in both countries had agreed to share cross-border information about the risks of glacial lake outburst floods across the Tibetan region, in a first step that could be expanded to the national level in an effort to reduce deaths and damage.

This May, a delegation from China’s Ministry of Water Resources and the Water Resources Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region held talks with Nepalese officials in charge of water and disaster management about establishing a joint disaster information mechanism.

Then in August, a team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences also visited Nepal for scientific research and exchange, sharing China’s experience in monitoring glacial lakes.

Nepal and China agree to cooperate on glacial lake flooding, as warming hikes threat

However, experts told Climate Home News that progress on putting in place concrete measures has been slow. Narendra Khanal, a professor in the department of geography at Tribhuvan University, blamed that partly on Nepal’s traditional administrative system and bureaucratic delays.

“We have to share information with them, and they have to share information with us,” he said. “In my understanding, the Chinese side is also facing difficulties in making this cooperation work.”

Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist and assistant professor at Kathmandu University, said China has the technology and human resources to provide significant information to its neighbour downstream.

But, to make that work, “we have to build trust between the two countries”, which is currently lacking but could be developed, he said. “As scientists, we are already working with them personally. If we create a trusted environment, cooperation should not be difficult.”

Nepal lacks monitoring and warning technology

Experts said Nepal – one of the world’s least-developed countries – does not have the technology or resources to install the sophisticated monitoring and warning systems needed to protect its population from growing threats linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas.

A senior meteorologist at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home News that the government had not invested enough in rainfall and weather monitoring stations, especially above 3,500 metres, and therefore lacks reliable data about what is happening at high altitudes.

“The stations we have are operated by different organisations, but many of them are not functioning properly,” the official added.

Comment: The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice

This year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund released initial funding for a $50-million project to address the risks from four glacial lakes in other parts of Nepal, but has come under criticism for taking seven years to approve the proposal. The fund said this was due to efforts needed to strengthen and consult on the project, as well as administrative, institutional and COVID-related delays.

Foreign minister Khanal said Nepal was calling on the international community for support to tackle global warming impacts into the future.

“This disaster should not be viewed simply as a one-time event requiring one-time assistance,” he emphasised. “We need to recognise the longer-term consequences of rising temperatures and climate change, particularly for vulnerable communities and developing countries.”

The post Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats

Amy Youngman is a legal and policy specialist at the campaigning group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The chair’s August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.

In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.

Five months later, in Nairobi, I watched the chair close a meeting while delegates still negotiated -allegedly to catch a flight. In 2024 and 2025, in Ottawa, Busan and Geneva, the same small group of blocking states grew bolder, cloaking opposition in language about defending the vulnerable while subsidising a system that fuels the pollution crisis. Offended by ambition, ashamed of nothing.

A year after the last formal attempt to negotiate a treaty, we are tasked with protecting a fragile process. And despite long-standing support, including legal, policy and technical expertise from my own Environmental Investigation Agency, the chair has excluded observers from the rooms where the treaty’s fate is being decided.

In that orchestrated quiet, the loudest proposal emerged: the suggestion that the instrument be a “framework convention.” The new Aid, intended to shape the late-September Heads of Delegation meeting, never uses the word “framework”. It does not need to. It strips back substantive obligations and presupposes future action.

A framework is no match for this crisis

Framework conventions outline broad principles and leave each country to develop its own plan, often delaying tough decisions to future negotiations that may never happen. This tactic is a political shell game: persuading states that want action now to give up meaningful, binding measures to reach agreement.

The Chair’s Aid arrives at a framework by subtraction rather than by proposal, which makes it harder to name and potentially easier to accept. Using the Aid, effectively the rejected text from Geneva, as a basis for the next informal meeting in Bangkok will be sold as a way to preserve a distressed UN system and reach consensus in a fractured geopolitical environment.

This is diplomacy drowning in wishful thinking that the countries fighting binding rules today will approve tougher ones tomorrow. Four years of negotiations and decades of climate diplomacy taught us that this is not a bridge to ambition – this is how ambition dies.

Production is driven by global oil, gas and chemical markets, while products and waste travel across borders. No singular government can regulate its way out of a problem created and amplified by a globalised system.

Countries have tried, and production kept rising. Now there is plastic everywhere we look, and the cost falls hardest on the people least responsible.

That failure is why there was consensus to negotiate a treaty, because this crisis requires global action. The purpose was never to list national efforts and call that progress but to create common global rules to address pollution.

The most politically sensitive issues cannot simply be postponed. How much plastic is produced, which toxic chemicals are allowed in it, which throwaway products are banned, and how future decisions are made are precisely the issues that require global answers. An instrument that refuses to negotiate them will be easier to adopt but useless on arrival.

Learn from climate governance

Supporters of a framework approach may point to the ozone treaty as proof that it can work. But the Vienna Convention succeeded for one reason: governments quickly adopted binding upstream controls on ozone-depleting substances.

Climate offers the opposite warning: a framework followed by contested, delayed and insufficient measures, while emissions keep rising.

The new chair not only deleted a direct reference to “production and consumption” and bracketed similar preambular language copied from the original mandate. The article on reporting borrows language from the Paris Agreement. Another summer of record heat, fires and floods offers a glimpse of how well that model is working.

Nothing suggests that the states blocking binding rules today will suddenly accept them tomorrow, and the exponential rise in unchecked plastic production will not pause while governments wait for courage. Blockage is not being resolved, but just pushed forward.

A framework would lock in the wrong response: unlimited upstream growth with waste management attempting to handle it downstream. No waste system can keep pace with a material engineered for endless growth.

Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot

After four years of INC negotiations, governments know this. States must reject the false choice that the only path to agreement is an instrument too weak to solve the problem it was created to address. Compromise is part of diplomacy. Surrender is not.

And if the UN keeps pushing that choice, the countries prepared to act must be willing to pursue alternative pathways. Groups of willing governments have built effective agreements before, and existing environmental regimes can deliver new rules without inventing a new empty instrument.

This process was never meant to find a lowest common denominator. It was to create the rules necessary to change our direction. Bangkok in September will be where the second iteration of this text is shaped. If ambitious countries do not push back, the argument about a framework convention will already be lost by default.

Negotiations cannot end with governments accepting the crisis rather than solving it. The science is clear and the damage is accelerating. The world does not need another promise to act later. It needs the treaty governments promised to deliver in 2022. 

The post The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics

With June’s UN climate talks inching towards gridlock, a group of diplomats calling themselves “Friends of Science” issued a stark warning: climate science was under attack in Bonn.

The coalition, spanning the world’s richest to its most vulnerable nations, pointed the finger primarily at those who think “science threatens their economic prospects” – a thinly-veiled reference to fossil fuel-dependent states accused of casting doubt on long-held scientific tenets in the UN climate process.

Fiji’s lead negotiator, Sivendra Michael, went still further. He denounced what he called “a very polluted narrative” taking hold outside the negotiating rooms and singled out ECO, a daily newsletter on the talks produced by Climate Action Network (CAN) International, for overlooking the issue.

“They are representing developing countries, but they are not representing us,” Michael said. His words hinted at how a rift between governments over the science of global warming has created tensions inside the climate movement.

Watchers of the UN climate talks have told Climate Home News there is growing unease over where the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs stands in an increasingly heated debate about how scientific messages produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are crafted and turned into global climate policy.

UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot

CAN’s international leadership has publicly backed a line of argument, championed by some big emerging economies including India, that questions how fair and equitable the models underpinning the work of the IPCC – the UN’s climate science body – are because they are dominated by research from the Global North.

But some climate activists, including from nations on the frontline of the climate crisis in the Pacific, are increasingly disappointed by CAN’s silence in a connected row over whether the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment report should be finished in time to inform the next UN scorecard of global climate action.

Over the last two years, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Kenya have pushed back against attempts by a large coalition of nations to align the IPCC’s AR7 report timeline with the second stocktake of national climate plans under the UN climate process. They claim this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.

India flags bias in IPCC assumptions

CAN International Executive Director Tasneem Essop spoke at an online event last month in which panelists challenged the “Friends of Science” campaign launched at the Bonn talks.

During the webinar, an Indian scientist and government negotiator set out her view that the IPCC’s way of working and scientific assumptions perpetuate inequity between developed and developing countries – and yet its reports have come to be treated as “scripture” that cannot be questioned.

In her intervention, Essop did not comment directly on the Bonn science campaign nor on the IPCC timeline issue. But the participation of CAN’s leadership in an event where such criticism of the IPCC was aired has sparked concern in some parts of the NGO community.

“The way in which CAN International is playing into what could be the destruction of the IPCC inputs into the climate process is very concerning,” said Bill Hare, who was involved in CAN’s establishment nearly four decades ago and now runs think-tank Climate Analytics.

Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks

He added that it was a mistake for CAN International to align itself with arguments made by India and Saudi Arabia, when those countries are blocking the conclusion of the IPCC’s next key report on cutting emissions in time for it to feed into the next global stocktake, which is due to conclude in 2028.

Like other insiders Climate Home News spoke to, the veteran Australian climate scientist fears these tensions could hamper CAN’s widely recognised power to influence the talks.

“The CAN International voice has been very, very important in the process. That voice doesn’t need to be diluted at this moment in history – that would be a really bad move,” Hare said.

Dialogue to reconcile differing views

Over the last decade, CAN has been working to transform itself into an organisation that is more representative of, and responsive to, voices and needs in the Global South. In 2019, it appointed Essop – a South African expert on climate, energy, poverty and social justice – as executive director, shifting further away from its European and North American roots.

CAN International, which functions as the broader network’s secretariat, says it is discussing how to reconcile varying views on the IPCC and the science and equity question among its hundreds of member groups spread across 130 countries.

“We acknowledge that there are different perspectives within a global network of over 2,000 members on these issues,” CAN International’s Essop said in response to questions from Climate Home News. “Given this diversity, we have democratic processes to build internal agreements.”

“Science and equity are both fundamental principles for effective climate action and are firmly embedded in CAN’s work,” she added in a written statement. “Putting these principles into practice in a painfully unjust world is not always straightforward, which is why we need continued dialogue across the network.”

Calls for “fair share” approach

The webinar in late August – which aimed to untangle what organisers described as “a growing narrative” that “treats science and equity as opposing priorities” – opened with a presentation by Tejal Kanitkar, a prominent Indian climate scientist who also serves on her government’s delegations at the IPCC and UN climate talks.

Outlining the findings of a paper she co-authored, Kanitkar argued that the IPCC had used scenarios for future emission reduction trajectories based primarily on assumptions put forward by Global North researchers that are skewed against the world’s poorest nations. These, she noted, were then incorporated into the first UN review of global climate action in 2023 and turned into widely cited emissions-cutting targets for limiting warming to 1.5C – a goal the UN has now conceded will be breached, at least temporarily.

Kanitkar said the “Friends of Science” group included “some of the people who have over-consumed the carbon budget and now use science as a slogan”. When Climate Home News raised the participation of diplomats from vulnerable countries, she said they should be asked why they “accept outcomes that burden the poorest the most”.

Commenting on Kanitkar’s presentation, CAN’s Essop said everyone knows that “imbalances of power dictate who sits at the table, who designs the models and who determines the assumptions underlying them”.

Her wider intervention focused more generally on the need to ensure that emissions-reduction pathways follow an equitable approach and account for the “fair share” of action countries need to take based on their historical responsibilities for climate change.

IPCC working to update models

Hare later acknowledged that most of the IPCC models used for 1.5C scenarios fail to account for the higher cost of capital and transition financing faced by developing countries. But as this is a “well-known” limitation, the IPCC gives a nuanced reading of the scenarios, and the next generation of models it uses is expected to include more consideration of equity, he added.

Echoing this, a climate scientist from a developing country currently involved in the IPCC process, who did not want to be identified, told Climate Home News that economic models inevitably contain biases and IPCC authors are already working to identify and correct them.

Despite criticisms of how IPCC scientific reports have been produced, all governments must sign off on every line of a key “summary for policy-makers” at a dedicated meeting. In 2023, the approved summary included the emissions reduction figures in question that informed the UN’s first global stocktake.

Irrespective of this wider debate, Hare said the “Friends of Science” campaign, which he supports, is focused on the timing of the IPCC’s next assessment cycle rather than the equity of its models.

Unresolved row over IPCC report timeline

A political battle over that time-frame has dragged on for more than two years at successive meetings of the science panel, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution.

A large majority of nations have been pushing for a timeline that would ensure the next round of AR7 reports can feed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings that this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and have lobbied for a longer process.

In Bonn this summer, the coalition that wants to align AR7 with the 2028 stocktake – which includes diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama – vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”, including the IPCC assessment reports.

They pointed the finger at “the usual suspects” but stopped short of singling out any countries at the public press conference. Discussions in the previous week had seen Saudi Arabia and India play down the centrality of IPCC reports in the UN stocktake and oppose calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios to limit an overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal.

Bonn upset fuels further tension

A campaigner with knowledge of internal discussions told Climate Home News that many civil society groups from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Pacific islands, had expected CAN International to back calls in Bonn defending the centrality of the IPCC in UN climate policy-making.

Despite this, a day before the “Friends of Science” press conference, CAN published an ECO newsletter that did not mention the issue. Instead, it voiced surprise over the claims of an attack on science happening in the negotiations and accused some of the IPCC’s loudest-defending governments of hypocrisy for continuing to expand fossil fuels and not delivering “fair shares” of emissions cuts and finance to the developing world.

“We were really shocked we could not find a common position and then this jarring narrative was being pushed,” the campaigner added.

After divisions hardened in Bonn, Hare said his organisation was approached by “very upset” CAN members from various regions about the stance taken by the network’s international leadership on the issue.

Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push

While Climate Home News understands that internal discussions have continued during the summer, including at a CAN leadership meeting in Nairobi in recent days, the campaigner said that CAN International’s endorsement of the recent webinar that directly challenged the “Friends of Science” coalition did not send a reassuring signal.

Some observers said they feared it would inflame tensions over how climate science is defined and utilised for policy purposes, with consequences reaching well beyond Bonn.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Essop said that “at a time when communities are experiencing the most horrific impacts of climate chaos, our collective energy must turn to solutions such as filling the Loss and Damage Fund, the phasing out of fossil fuels led by the Global North, and justice for people who are least responsible for this climate emergency”.

The post As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond appeared first on Climate Home News.

As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond