By Rachel Bryce
On 26 August 2026, the barrier lake on the Nepal-Tibet border overflowed and has resulted in devastating and deadly floods along the Bhote Koshi River basin. Hundreds of homes have been lost and entire neighbourhoods in Syaprubesi, Betrawati, and Trisuli are gone. As of Monday, 7 September 2026, nearly 1,400 people have died and thousands more remain missing. Beyond the incomprehensible numbers, these floods have left children without parents, parents without children, and families without homes. A five-year-old child, Kirti Tamang, survived the floods just to discover her mother and her sister gone. A devastated husband returned to find his wife buried by mud. Photojournalist, Suman Nepali, reported: “Trisuli Bazar was gone. Devighat was gone. The road further up to the Chinese border was gone.”
This is because of climate change. These disasters will only worsen due to our failures to cap carbon emissions. We are entering the hottest El Niño in 1,000 years, triggering skyrocketing temperatures and more extreme weather events.
Emergency Response
For Nepal, the current focus is rightly centred on emergency disaster relief and response. To support emergency relief directly, readers can donate directly to the Government of Nepal Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund or transparent non-profits on the ground. Emergency response and disaster relief in Nepal stems from the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act 2074 and the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Rules 2076, which outline requirements across levels of government to prepare for, respond to, and rehabilitate after disasters. Already a week following the disaster, nearly 20,000 security personnel have been deployed in the rescue and relief efforts. These efforts require millions if not billions of dollars, however, and the Government of Nepal has requested an urgent decision from the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage to provide immediate assistance to address the losses and damages caused by the devastating floods in the Bhotekoshi River. Commentators point to this as a true test of this Fund.
Early Warning
Looking forward, we know the risk of future flooding is high and may impact millions. An Assistant Secretary General at the United Nations has warned that the Himalayan region faces severe risks from future glacial floods into the future. According to Guardian reporting, “[t]here are now fears that entire riverbanks where millions of people live might become effectively uninhabitable.” Saliently, Nepal and the surrounding region do not yet have a comprehensive early warning system in place. Monitoring, information sharing, and shared emergency reporting systems must be upgraded and collaborative. These systems save lives; indeed, farther downstream, they saved lives in these floods; 1,643 children were saved by a principal’s connection to an early warning system, which allowed them to evacuate just ahead of the destruction of their school. However, further up the mountain, closer to the source, only mere minutes of warning was possible; revealing the limits of adaptation and the urgent need for climate communication and data sharing with local communities. Indeed, Inside Climate News cites Bethan Davies, Professor of Glaciology at Newcastle University, who concludes: “the only adaptation would be migration away from increasingly hazardous locations.” In this case, advanced warning systems may permit collaborative and dignified planned relocation; not as an ideal, but often a life saver.
Displacement and Migration
Those displaced following these floods are currently evacuated or moving to family or friends outside the region. Evacuations are, by design, temporary and many of those displaced will want to return to the home they once knew. This may be possible with sufficient funds and rebuilding efforts. However, as noted, many will not be able to or may not be safe to return.
People displaced or at risk of displacement due to flooding have a range of legal pathways available to them, should they decide to move. Planned relocation – or managed retreat – has been increasingly proposed as a pathway of last resort for communities in the highest risk regions. Migration laws permit both ordinary cross-border movement via visitor, work, and study pathways and specialised pathways for people facing disaster risks. Circular resettlement has also already been applied as adaptive migration within or outside of Nepal. Then, in very particular contexts, with overlapping persecution, refugee law may apply.
Note that whilst Nepal’s National Adaptation Plan recognises climate-related migration, migration-specific legislations for social protection and planned relocation are absent. Likewise, although the Pacific leads in regional frameworks and bilateral agreements for migration, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is sporadic. Indeed, to fill this gap, there are calls for a South Asian Regional Framework on Climate Mobility. As climate effects and disasters know no borders, regional cooperation is key.
Climate Justice
These floods emphasise to us all that action to protect and prevent harm is a question of justice. Climate activists in Nepal rightly point out “We are suffering for a crime that we did not commit.” Dr. Ramu Kharel, Nepali physician, explains:
The injustice here is stark. Nepal produces roughly 0.05 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. The United States is responsible for about 24 percent of cumulative fossil carbon dioxide emissions since 1850; China accounts for about 15 percent and is now the largest annual emitter.
Meanwhile, Nepal has expanded community forests, built an electricity system dominated by hydropower, and made electric vehicles 73 percent of new passenger-vehicle imports last year. Nepal is pursuing precisely the transition wealthier countries prescribe — and is still paying for warming it did little to create.
This flooding is not simply about homes destroyed and people lost, it is about infrastructure indefinitely out of commission, access to water, food, and energy shut off, and instability on the rise. Top of mind is how this disaster relates to us all. The Nepali households bearing the traumatic and unjust cost of this disaster also echo a very real risk of harm to households around the world facing their own environmental shocks. Climate vulnerable regions around the world look now to Nepal and must ask the same questions: what are we doing to protect and prevent these disasters?
The Loss and Damage Fund exists for this reason, and the eyes of the world are on the decisions of the implementing body of the Fund: is it fit for purpose? The complexity of disasters requires a complexity of legal responses and tools. With the devastation of lost lives and livelihoods in Nepal, we are called to reflect on how these tools work in practice and how we can continue to strengthen them going forward.
Rachel Bryce has been researching and advocating for expanded legal pathways for people on the move in the context of disasters and climate change for the past five years. She is a Doctoral Candidate and Affiliate with the Refugee Law Initiative, interrogating how regional free movement arrangements respond – or do not respond – to environmentally-linked migration. She is a Canadian immigration, refugee, and human rights lawyer and the Chair of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers’ Climate Migration Working Group. With this Working Group, she collaborated on two landmark reports on legal and policy responses to climate migration. Rachel is also working with Beyond Climate Collaborative and Earth Refuge to present the first annual Climate Mobility & Legal Innovation Programme. Rachel holds a JD/MGA from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of International Economics from the University of British Columbia.
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