Strange as it may sound, climate change concerns came to Nepal not through any indigenously felt impacts of global warming but via foreign aid. And, as the Age of Foreign Aid ends, the country’s currently practised climate actions, too, might wind down.

Even globally, till the 1972 Stockholm Earth Summit, the issue was less about the earth’s atmosphere heating up because of what we today call greenhouse gases (GHGs) and more to do with transboundary air pollution and some worry about the depleting ozone layer. It was only sixteen years later that the impacts of GHGs on atmospheric temperature was acknowledged with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. That fact was formalized by the Male Declaration on Global Warming and Sea Level Rise the following year, and finally the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The cornerstone agreement on GHGs was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that asked the industrialized North to reduce its CO₂ emissions but was lenient towards poorer countries of the Global South. As the North started to de-industrialize with their manufacturing migrating to East Asia, they became hostile towards Kyoto. It was eventually watered down to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which is failing to achieve the goal set in limiting global temperature rise. Now that Trump 2.0 has withdrawn the US from it (again!), Paris, too, is sinking into global confusion and perhaps, unfortunately, into a limbo.

This four-decade history of international climate concerns migrated to Nepal with a significant time lag, actually only towards the first decade of the 21st century. Specifically, that became most evident with the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference that saw the participation of some eight cabinet ministers and 600 assorted Nepalis, mainly because by then every donor agency had a climate-tagged project in most government agencies and NGOs. My colleague, Sudhindra Sharma, has described how the six-decade-long history of foreign aid in Nepal is characterized by an ever-changing philosophy, and hence direction, every decade or so, from import substitution to export led, structural adjustment to basic needs to poverty alleviation, etc, etc. Such paradigm shifts have left Nepal’s official agencies unstable and perpetually playing catch-up, with climate change being the latest governance-guiding mantra to the subsuming, exclusion or downplaying of other development objectives.

The tricky issue with climate change, now more so after the 2022 Sharm al-Sheikh Egypt COP27 finally admitted that the climate problem is ultimately a water problem, is that it is not a ‘tame’ but a ‘wicked problem’, where let alone solutions, there is pervasive disagreement about even ‘what the problem is’. Indeed, while global warming was caused by the energy sector with the burning of too much fossil fuel, the impact on society is through the water sector, with too much or too little water at the wrong time and place. What global warming has done is to change the atmosphere with its moisture-laden wind patterns to shift from that of a gently simmering kettle to a violently ebullient one with unpredictable consequences.

The seven colours of water

Life-giving water, in its global cycle, comes in seven different colours, each of which is affected by global warming very differently. White (atmospheric) water has been discussed above. When it precipitates on land, it becomes green (soil moisture) water without which no forests, wildlife therein or dryland agriculture practised by the poorest in most countries would exist. That green water would also include permafrost (or frozen soil) that is melting and leading to sinkholes in Siberia as well as slippery hillslopes coming down as massive landslides in the Himalaya, as happened in Melamchi in 2021 and in Rasuwa this year.

Some of the green water seeps underground to become brown (underground aquifer) water that, as the largest water storage system, has increasingly become the lifeline of all major cities as well as commercial agriculture. Precipitation that does not evaporate back becomes groundwater or soil moisture but also overflows to emerge as blue (rivers, lakes and glaciers) surface water. Blue is the hegemon among different water colours that has hijacked most of the national and international attention as well as funding for research and development to the detriment of all the others.

Used water comes in two forms: grey water, which is mostly domestic wastewater that is organic and easy to recycle, and black water, which is much more toxic industrial wastewater and very costly to clean and re-use, both of which if ignored poison blue and brown water bodies. All these waters eventually come from the evaporation of magenta (salty ocean) waters into white water.

What global warming is doing—and which Nepal is experiencing—is making white water more violently excessive or scarce, green water not only desiccated, leading to forest fires and crop failures but melting of permafrost and increased disastrous landslides; brown water less recharged because more white water is precipitating in short intense bursts with more flood flow; and blue water scarce in the dry season but flash flooded in the wet days. And even magenta water is expanding with the increase in global heat and the drowning of coastal cities and island states. In fact, the rapid melting of polar ice caps is threatening the slowing or reversal of deep ocean currents that will have continent-scale changes in weather patterns, including for far-from-ocean Nepal.

To understand the wickedness of the water and climate combo problem, one needs to bear in mind that on each colour of water is dependent a very different social formation within countries with conflicting policy prescriptions about what the problem is and what needs to be done. Even worse, as of today, the uncomfortable truth is that many of Nepal’s water problems are caused less by climate change and more by mal-development practices. Climate change will indeed make matters worse in the decades ahead about which global governments let alone a country like Nepal might not be able to do much, but Nepal can and must stop and reverse mal-developments. The ‘best’ example of a major mal-development water problem is the drying up of springs across the Himalaya, Nepal included, not so much because of changing rainfall patterns as due to excessive groundwater pumping and bulldozing of hillsides to construct landslide-exacerbating roads and hydropower tunnelling that completely changes subterranean flows. All of which is contributing to springshed deterioration and ultimately rural outmigration as well as agriculture decline.

Because both climate change and water issues in Nepal are directed towards and fatally tied to foreign aid programmes, there is very little genuine indigenous efforts to counter potential impacts. Nepal’s ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs 1 to 3) under the Paris agreement is based on the highly questionable assumption that massive foreign funding will materialize to implement them. National climate policies are thus geared towards sounding sweet to donors even as the country’s fossil fuel addiction grows uncontrollably. Unlike Iceland, which transitioned from dependence on imported fossil fuel to a fully renewable energy country through far-sighted government intervention, Nepal, though blessed with plenty of hydropower potential, is finding itself importing more dirty coal-fired electricity from India, and unwittingly increasing every Nepali’s carbon footprint.

Nepal will not get out of its climate and water quandary until it begins to seriously rethink both its aid-addicted development and foreign aid-besotted and unresponsive governance system.