Nepal’s young political leadership and climate campaigners are calling on the world’s largest polluting economies to compensate the country for mounting environmental losses as rising temperatures destabilise Himalayan glaciers.
Despite contributing relatively little to global carbon emissions, Nepal faces severe consequences from climate change, including destructive floods linked to melting ice and thawing permafrost.
For 26-year-old climate activist Tashi Lhazom, the crisis is deeply personal.
When she was 11, a glacial lake overflowed and flooded her family’s home in a remote Himalayan valley. The disaster devastated their livelihood, leaving only two survivors from a herd of hundreds of yaks.
In 2025, another flash flood struck her village. Scientists attributed that event to melting permafrost associated with global warming.
Those experiences helped shape Lhazom’s involvement in climate activism and politics. When young Nepalis took to the streets a year ago, she joined other campaigners in the Gen Z-led movement that eventually brought a youth-dominated government to power in March.
The urgency of her campaign intensified last month after a glacial collapse triggered a massive inland wave that devastated Himalayan valleys in Nepal and Tibet, leaving more than 8,000 people dead or missing.
Following the disaster, Lhazom renewed her demand for financial compensation from countries responsible for a substantial share of global emissions. She described Nepal’s situation as a national climate emergency.
She argued that international support should move beyond conventional foreign assistance towards compensation and reparations for climate-related destruction.
Her position reflects a central demand of Nepal’s emerging generation of climate activists: countries that have contributed least to global warming should not be left to bear its most devastating costs alone.
