Bold

794 bodies recovered. Thousands still unaccounted for. Tell us, what was their crime? I am writing this from the Himalayas from a country responsible for only around 0.1% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Nearly 46% of our land is covered by forests. Around 94% of our installed electricity capacity comes from hydropower. We are rapidly moving away from fossil-fuel vehicles too: EVs accounted for about 74% of Nepal’s four-wheeled passenger vehicle imports in 2025/26. We protect forests. We generate electricity from our rivers. We are embracing electric mobility at a pace few countries in the world have matched. Yet today, our people are digging through mud, searching rivers and waiting beside phones for the names of their loved ones. The Bhote Koshi flash flood has shown us what it means to live beneath a rapidly changing cryosphere. Our glaciers are retreating, our frozen mountains are becoming increasingly unstable, and the rivers that generate our clean electricity can also carry destruction into communities below. We did not build our prosperity by burning generations of coal and oil. We contributed almost nothing to creating the climate crisis at this scale. But we are being forced to survive its consequences. The people whose bodies are being pulled from rivers did not cause this crisis. The families still waiting for thousands of missing people did not cause it. The children, farmers, workers and mountain communities who lost everything did not cause it. So from the Himalayas, we ask the industrialised world: how many Himalayan bodies will be enough? How many mothers must wait for children who never return? How many villages must disappear before “climate justice” becomes more than a speech at another conference? Do not come to us only with sympathy after the bodies have been counted. Come with responsibility. Come with climate finance, adaptation, loss-and-damage support and the courage to cut emissions at the scale this emergency demands. We want climate justice. We want the right to survive in our own mountains. We want a world where being born in the Himalayas is not a death sentence for a crisis we did not create.