Perhaps the goal of climate finance should not simply be to help vulnerable countries recover, but to reduce the need to keep recovering from the same disasters while carrying the financial burden
We are quick to call people resilient after a disaster. There is a strange comfort in the word. It allows us to move on without asking what resilience costs.
In Nepal, rebuilding has become a familiar part of life. We have rebuilt after earthquakes, floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, and many other crises. Communities come together, support arrives from within Nepal and beyond its borders, and families find ways to start again.
But what happens when resilience becomes an expectation? When people are repeatedly asked to absorb the financial, emotional, and physical costs of rebuilding?
The August 26 floods brought that question into focus. Lives were lost, homes and farms were damaged, livelihoods disrupted, and years of savings and hard work were put at risk.
Nepal will rebuild. But perhaps it is time to ask a harder question: How many times should people be asked to rebuild, and at what cost?
Nepal contributes only around 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet remains highly exposed to the impacts of a changing climate. This is not about assigning blame to any country. Climate change is a global challenge shaped over decades, and addressing it requires collective action. But collective action must also recognise that its costs are not being shared equally. For families living through a disaster, climate change is not an abstract discussion about emissions, targets or international negotiations. It is the uncertainty of rebuilding a home, the loss of a livelihood, the depletion of hard-earned savings, and the difficult reality of starting over.
Nepal is increasingly looking to climate finance to respond to climate-related risks and recover from disasters. That financing is essential, but so is asking what kind of finance is appropriate when communities are recovering from catastrophic losses. Concessional loans can support long-term development, infrastructure, and resilience. But when a family has lost its home, livelihood, or productive assets, borrowing to rebuild can add another layer of vulnerability. The disaster may happen once; the debt can follow a family for decades.
Climate finance, therefore, should not be measured only by how much money is mobilised, but also by who repays it, on what terms, and what repayment means for people already struggling to recover.
For climate-vulnerable countries, grants for recovery and addressing loss and damage are part of a broader conversation on climate justice, particularly for people and countries facing severe climate impacts despite having contributed relatively little to the emissions driving climate change.
At the household level, the distinction between a grant and a loan is far from technical. It can mean the difference between rebuilding a life and rebuilding it with debt.
Disasters do not affect everyone equally. For many women in Nepal, limited ownership of land, property, and other assets can make recovery more difficult. In 2021, only 17% of rural households reported women ownership of fixed assets, falling to just 6% in Sudurpaschim Province, according to the Nepal Economic Forum.
When homes, farms or livelihoods are lost, limited asset ownership can further constrain women's access to formal finance, particularly when collateral is required. Climate finance and recovery efforts must therefore be gender-responsive, ensuring women can access the resources they need, have a voice in recovery decisions, and rebuild their economic security and independence.
Recovery is often measured through visible things: houses reconstructed, roads repaired, bridges restored, crops replanted. These are important. But rebuilding also involves things that are much harder to measure. It is also about restoring confidence and hope people need to invest in and plan for the future.
Resilience is not simply the ability to rebuild. It is also the ability to believe that rebuilding is worth it. That belief becomes harder to sustain when communities repeatedly experience disasters, rebuild with whatever resources they can find, and then face another crisis a few years later.
The question, therefore, cannot only be: How do we help Nepal recover from this disaster? It must also be: How do we reduce the likelihood and severity of the next one?
Climate finance should not only arrive after disaster strikes. It must also reach communities before disasters through early warning systems, resilient infrastructure, climate-adaptive agriculture, risk reduction, social protection, and locally led solutions. When disasters occur, support must reach affected people quickly, transparently, and in forms they can access. That means looking beyond how much money is pledged and asking how much reaches communities, how quickly it arrives, who can access it, and how much must ultimately be repaid. For Nepal, this is not an argument against international cooperation or development lending. It is about matching the right kind of finance to the right need: loans can support development and infrastructure, while grants and other non-debt-creating support are particularly important when communities face catastrophic climate-related losses.
Ultimately, climate finance is not about billions on a spreadsheet. It is about whether a family can rebuild without taking on years of debt, whether a woman who has lost her livelihood can access support without collateral, whether a farmer can invest in another season, and whether a child can return to school.
Nepali people have shown they can rebuild. But resilience should not become an expectation that people endlessly absorb the costs of crises they did little to create. Perhaps the goal of climate finance should not simply be to help vulnerable countries recover, but to reduce the need to keep recovering from the same disasters while carrying the financial burden.
Nepal will rebuild. The question is whether the systems supporting that recovery will allow people to do so with dignity, security, and hope.
Ghale works in communications within Nepal's development sector