Most childhood animated movies end with comfort. Something goes wrong, damage is done, and, by the final scene, balance is restored. The world looks familiar again. Hope returns, things go back to how they were, and that reassurance stays with us even after end credits. Rewatching Happy feet (2006) as an adult, I did not feel that comfort. The ice does not return to the original state. The oceans do not magically refill with fish. What changes is human behaviour. Humans stop fishing, penguins survive. Life continues, not because damage is reversed, but because the system adjusts to the new reality. This ending felt uncomfortably realistic. Nepal is a nature-based economy, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our electricity comes from rivers. Our tourism depends on mountains, forests, hills, snowlines, and the silence they offer. Agriculture depends on the monsoon. Nature is not a side character in Nepal's economy, but the main infrastructure. Yet, when development is discussed, nature appears mainly as a resource to be tapped and optimised. Hydropower lies at the centre of this contradiction. Hydropower looks like a success story, and in many ways it is. Nepal has over 3,000 MW of installed electricity capacity, more than 95% of which is from hydropower. Load shedding, which was once a daily reality, has largely disappeared. Electricity exports to India have grown rapidly, now expanding to Bangladesh via Indian transmission infrastructure. On the stock market, hydropower companies dominate listings and daily trading volumes. Energy matters. Without electricity, there cannot be industrial growth, electric vehicles, and the flourishing digital economy. So, instinctively, we find hydropower as something to be celebrated. And in this celebration, other questions begin to feel secondary, even trivial. Most public discussions focus on one angle: how climate change affects hydropower. We talk about floods damaging hydro projects, melting glaciers disrupting the river flows, and unpredictable rainfall affecting generation, especially for Nepal's run-of-the river projects dependent on seasonal rain. These are valid concerns, but they frame hydropower only as a victim. The less comfortable question is the opposite one: how do hydropower projects themselves affect ecosystems and increase climate vulnerability? Nepal has more than 140 operational hydropower projects, with hundreds more planned or under construction. Many rivers house multiple projects, one after another. Run-of-river plants divert water through tunnels for kilometers before releasing it downstream. On the surface, this looks gentle as the river flows on. But underneath, key processes change. Sediment (sand, gravel, organic matter, nutrients) stop moving naturally, fish lose breeding grounds, and water temperature shifts. Riverbeds erode, floodplains lose fertility, the diverted rivers heat up, reducing oxygen level and stressing aquatic life. Ecologists call this ecosystem simplification, meaning fragility. Simplified rivers collapse faster during floods, recover slowly after drought, and support fewer livelihoods. The developers often argue that run-of-river projects have smaller environmental footprints, but we should know that smaller footprint doesn't mean small impact, especially when there are many project fragments in a single river. How much intervention can a river system absorb before it stops functioning as a living system? Rivers don't collapse overnight. They degrade, don't return to their old state, and just stabilise at a lower ecological level. Hydropower is often called clean energy. In carbon terms, that is mostly true. But climate risk is not only about carbon emissions, it is about resilience. Recent floods have damaged many hydropower projects across Nepal, disrupting hundreds of megawatts of electricity generation, leading to losses worth billions. The September 2024 floods alone damaged 13 projects. Climate change played a role, but so did where and how the plants were built. That is more like feedback from stressed nature. Despite decades of construction, Nepal's electricity system remains uneven. We have surplus electricity during the monsoon and shortages in the dry season. Storage is limited. Transmission lags behind generation. Exports depend heavily on neighbouring markets and political agreements beyond Nepal's control. Rivers are also livelihoods. Rafting, irrigation, and tourism depend on it. Tourism contributes about 6.7% to Nepal's GDP with over 20% of Nepal's foreign exchange earnings in good years, supporting more than a million jobs. That income depends on ecosystems staying alive, not just visible. This is not an argument against hydropower. Electricity is essential for development. The issue is how much ecological change we normalise in the process. Countries that manage hydropower well plan at the river-basin level, limit the fragmentation, and enforce environmental flows. Nepal remains inconsistent on all three. This matters economically, not just ecologically. The World Bank's recent Nepal Development Update notes that Nepal's economic rebound is being driven largely by tourism and hydropower expansion. Nepal is increasingly struggling to balance these two core nature-based economic pillars, without degrading the very environment both depend on. Happy Feet made us realise that some damage is irreversible. Survival comes from adjusting to what's already happened, not from restoring what once was. Hydropower can remain central, but only if we stop treating nature as a limitless resource and start thinking of it as the system we depend on. A nature-based economy cannot only survive on extractive thinking. It needs nature-based thinking, which is planning that respects limits, cumulative impacts, and sustainability. Development will definitely continue. The real choice is simple: Do we only measure progress by what we build or also by what we choose not to lose?