分类： environment

Eight years ago, Nepal grappled with crippling energy insecurity: just two-thirds of its population had access to electricity, and connected homes endured up to 16 hours of blackouts daily. Through aggressive expansion of its hydropower sector, paired with anti-corruption reforms and strategic seasonal energy imports from India, Nepal pulled off a remarkable energy turnaround by 2018, delivering 24/7 power to nearly the entire country.

Today, Nepal’s energy sector is almost entirely powered by the fast-flowing glacial rivers of the Himalayas, with 225 operational hydropower plants holding 3,900 megawatts of installed capacity—enough to power 3 million households simultaneously. Hundreds more projects are under construction or planned, and the nation earns nearly $200 million annually exporting surplus clean electricity to neighboring India and Bangladesh. This natural advantage, however, has turned into a critical vulnerability as climate change rapidly reshapes the Himalayan landscape, where temperatures are rising 50% faster than the global average.

Last week’s catastrophic flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border laid bare this existential risk. The disaster, which preliminary investigations trace to a collapsed glacial formation and bedrock collapse, has killed more than 1,300 people and left thousands more missing. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and 12 hydropower plants in the Trishuli River basin—including major international investment projects—sustained severe damage, knocking out more than 10% of Nepal’s total electricity generation capacity. Plant operators say it remains unclear whether any of the damaged facilities can be restored to service.

The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), which owns six of the damaged plants, has moved to reassure domestic consumers that current power supplies remain adequate. But NEA spokesman Rajan Dhakal acknowledges that the rising frequency of climate-linked disasters has forced a long-overdue reckoning: “The time has come for a rethink of our hydropower policy.”

Most of Nepal’s existing and planned hydropower projects are built high in the Himalayan mountains, relying on fast-flowing currents without large water storage systems. This design keeps construction costs low but leaves infrastructure extremely vulnerable to glacial outburst floods and flash floods. Between 2018 and 2024, more than 90% of all disaster events recorded in Nepal were climate-related, a trend that has accelerated in recent years: the Trishuli River basin has already been hit by two major flood events in the past two years, first in 2024 from a cloudburst and again in 2025 from a glacial lake outburst in Tibet that killed 11 people and closed a key Nepal-China border crossing for six months.

Even with that history of hazard, critics say project planners and international lenders failed to take adequate preventive action. The $647 million Upper Trishuli-1 project, one of Nepal’s largest foreign direct investment ventures backed by the Asian Development Bank and International Finance Corporation, was all but destroyed in the latest floods. Another major project, Upper Trishuli 3A, funded by China’s Export-Import Bank, also suffered severe damage. Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, says international lenders were fully aware of the extreme risks but ignored repeated warnings and failed to implement stringent safety measures.

“Their own reports repeatedly highlighted it. But they did not take any preventive steps, did not demand stringent checks and balances, nor were they prepared for a calamity they knew could occur,” Thakkar says.

Dhakal of NEA concedes that even when climate risks were correctly assessed, hydropower plant designs were not adjusted to account for them: “Clearly we will need to improve in the way we build and operate our hydropower plants.”

The conversation around rethinking Nepal’s energy strategy has split stakeholders into two broad camps, though all agree that change is needed. One path, proposed by the NEA, is shifting to reservoir-based hydropower projects that do not need to be sited in high-risk mountain areas, allowing for controlled water storage and release. But this approach carries steep economic and environmental costs that could slow Nepal’s energy expansion.

Many energy and climate experts argue the country needs to move beyond overreliance on hydropower and diversify into wind and solar energy. A report from a German aid agency found Nepal’s total technical potential for solar power is roughly 10 times greater than its hydropower potential. “We should not be putting all our eggs in one basket in these dangerous times,” says Kushal Gurung, founder of clean tech firm WindPower Nepal. “We need to seriously embrace other alternatives as well, like solar and wind. And for that we will need to revise our energy policy that is at the moment very pro-hydropower.”

Vivek Shastry, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, echoes this view, noting that adding wind and solar capacity acts as a built-in resilience strategy that can prevent widespread system failure if a major hydropower facility is knocked offline.

Other analysts note that while diversification makes sense, hydropower will remain Nepal’s core competitive advantage in South Asian energy markets for the foreseeable future. “While there is untapped capacity in wind and solar, hydropower really is the one that gives Nepal massive competitive advantage vis-a-vis its South Asian neighbours,” says Puspa Sharma, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies.

The financial toll of rising climate disasters is already hitting Nepal’s private hydropower sector. Over the past three years, insurers have paid out roughly $40 million in flood damage claims for more than 20 privately owned plants, and insurance premiums have risen so sharply that many operators say doing business is becoming unfeasible.

Beyond Nepal’s borders, the disaster highlights the global inequity of climate change: Nepal is responsible for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions driving glacial melt, yet it faces disproportionate climate risk. Manjeet Dhakal, a member of Nepal’s UN climate delegation, says climate risks are cross-border and cannot be managed by Nepal alone.

“Nepal is among the least responsible for the greenhouse emissions that led to these exacerbated risks. Ironically, our hydropower industry is an attempt to reduce our already minimal emissions… We cannot, and should not, be made to respond to these risks alone,” he says, calling for global cooperation on shared data collection, impact assessment, and cross-border early-warning systems.

A small agricultural town on Malaysia’s Borneo Island has recorded hazardous haze levels that cross the country’s emergency threshold, amplifying concerns over the annual regional air quality crisis driven by Indonesian forest fires. On Friday, Sarawak state’s Serian, a border community of roughly 89,000 people adjacent to Indonesia’s Kalimantan province, saw its Air Pollutant Index (API) spike to 521, according to official data from Malaysia’s environment department. Not far away, Kuching, Sarawak’s capital and largest urban center, also posted a dangerous reading of 311, placing it firmly in the hazardous category of Malaysia’s air quality scale.

Transboundary haze is a chronic seasonal challenge for Southeast Asia. Every dry season, smoke from slash-and-burn land clearing and forest fires in Indonesia drifts across national borders, degrading air quality in neighboring countries including Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore. Under Malaysia’s regulatory framework, any API reading above 500 triggers an emergency protocol that requires halting non-essential work and outdoor activities; schools have already been ordered closed in areas with readings exceeding 200. As of Friday evening, Malaysian officials had not yet issued a formal emergency declaration for Serian.

This year’s haze outbreak is far more severe than average, experts note, fueled by a combination of increased fire activity across multiple Indonesian provinces and extended dry weather conditions that have allowed blazes to spread rapidly across Borneo. Sarawak has emerged as the hardest-hit region in Malaysia, with multiple localities recording hazardous air pollution levels for consecutive days.

Indonesian authorities have ramped up response efforts to contain the blazes. Latest satellite data from Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry, released Friday, shows 717 confirmed hot spots — areas of elevated temperature linked to active fires — detected across the country since August 1, with 103 new hot spots recorded in just the 24-hour period leading up to the report. To slow fire growth, Indonesian authorities have deployed large-scale ground and aerial firefighting teams, and have carried out cloud seeding operations to induce much-needed rain.

Law enforcement action has also been stepped up, particularly in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo that is the source of much of this year’s smoke. Five companies operating in the province have already had their business licenses suspended over allegations that illegal fires burned within their concession areas. Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni announced that penalties could extend far beyond temporary suspensions: companies that fail to meet mandatory land restoration requirements, or that are found to have intentionally set fires, will face full criminal prosecution.

The ongoing crisis highlights the persistent challenge of addressing transboundary air pollution in Southeast Asia, where dry seasonal conditions and lax land management enforcement have created a recurring public health threat that crosses national borders.

A growing public health and environmental emergency is unfolding across Southeast Asia, as months of uncontrolled wildfires in Indonesia have spawned a thick blanket of toxic haze that has drifted across national borders, endangering millions of people and threatening massive carbon emissions from vulnerable ecosystems.

Weeks after the first blazes ignited across Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo in mid-July, the smog now covers large swathes of Indonesia and has spread to neighboring Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. In the hardest-hit areas, pollution levels have surpassed 15 times the maximum safe limit set by the World Health Organization, pushing air quality into the “acutely unhealthy” range that threatens even healthy adults, not just vulnerable groups.

For local residents, the daily reality of living under the haze is grim. Nineteen-year-old teaching assistant Rizma Nur Fatimah, who works at a school in Banjarbaru, South Kalimantan, described visibility so poor that “you couldn’t even see your own feet” inside her classroom. Even sealed indoor spaces offer little protection: “Even inside the house, with everything closed, the haze still got in,” she said. Having grown up with annual haze events, Fatimah noted that this year’s crisis is far worse than previous seasons, leaving local communities resigned to chronic poor air quality. Twenty-three-year-old mother Misbah, from nearby Pengayuan village, said her three-year-old daughter has already developed persistent cough, sore throat, and runny nose from prolonged exposure to the smog.

The health impacts are being felt hundreds of kilometers away, too. On the Philippine island province of Palawan, residents and medical workers report widespread respiratory and allergic symptoms linked to the drifting smoke. “We are now experiencing mild headaches,” said local physician Dr Precious Bañas-Melad. “My cousin who isn’t allergic to anything started developing allergies. My husband is the first one who had itchy eyes and throat.” Across the border in Malaysia, national health authorities have recorded sharp increases in asthma and conjunctivitis cases as air quality declines across the country.

Between July and August alone, Indonesia’s Ministry of Health confirmed more than 50,000 cases of respiratory infections directly linked to the land and forest fires, with children under five accounting for over 12,000 of those cases.

While this year’s extreme severity is being driven by a Super El Niño event that has worsened drought conditions across the region, experts emphasize that the recurring crisis is deeply rooted in decades of human-caused land use change. The pattern dates back to the Suharto era, when vast areas of ancient rainforest and carbon-rich peatland in Kalimantan were cleared for logging, industrial agriculture, and large-scale infrastructure projects. Today, environmental groups, researchers, and official government investigations have repeatedly documented that many commercial operators use fire as a low-cost method to clear large tracts of land for industrial plantations.

Unlike small-scale, community-managed traditional burning practices that are tightly controlled, large-scale clearing fires are far harder to contain and create far greater harm to both public health and the environment. Drained peatlands, industrial timber estates, and oil palm plantations create landscapes that are far more vulnerable to burning, and blazes often reoccur in the same degraded areas year after year.

What makes this year’s fires on Indonesian Borneo particularly alarming is that they are tearing through one of the world’s largest tropical peatland ecosystems. These unique landscapes act as massive natural carbon sinks: under normal waterlogged conditions, decomposition is slowed, allowing carbon to accumulate underground for thousands of years. But when drained and burned, these same carbon stores turn into what researchers call carbon “bombs,” releasing thousands of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in just weeks or months, worsening the climate change that drives extreme drought and El Niño events in a dangerous feedback loop.

“Peatlands are incredibly effective carbon stores because their waterlogged conditions slow decomposition, allowing carbon to accumulate underground for thousands of years,” explained Dr Nisa Novita, a peatland researcher at Indonesian conservation NGO Yayasan Konservasi Alam Nusantara. “But this also means they can become a ‘carbon bomb’ when they are drained or burned, because that carbon can be rapidly released into the atmosphere.”

As the Super El Niño event continues to intensify through the coming months, experts warn the worst may still be ahead. Forest fire forensics expert Professor Bambang Hero Saharjo, from Institut Pertanian Bogor University, noted that in 2025, without an El Niño event, Indonesian wildfires burned roughly 359,000 hectares of land. This year, he projects the burned area could reach 11 million hectares, putting the 2026 season on par with the devastating 1997-1998 wildfires, one of the worst on record for Indonesia.

Indonesia’s Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni confirmed this week that the fight to contain the blazes is now entering its most critical phase. “Our problems are not over. September is the peak of El Niño,” he said. “September is the main fight for us.”

In the low-lying coastal community of Melekeok, a 300-person chiefdom on Palau’s largest island, storm surges driven by rising sea levels now routinely flood residential properties, forcing residents to plead for government support to relocate inland. For 43-year-old Bol Sebalt, a lifelong Melekeok resident who works as a legislative clerk and trained disaster response volunteer, the need for relocation could not be clearer — but chronic underfunding has left the community trapped.

Sebalt already moved to a newly platted inland subdivision designated for Melekeok’s displaced population, but she remains the only resident months after relocation preparations began. Funding for critical infrastructure including plumbing, sewage systems, and street lighting has trickled in in small, fragmented batches, moving far too slow to match the accelerating pace of climate change. “We cannot move faster than climate change,” Sebalt told the Associated Press, summing up the existential crisis shared by dozens of low-lying Pacific island nations facing encroaching oceans.

This collective crisis took center stage this week at the annual Pacific Islands Forum summit hosted in Palau, where leaders from the region’s most climate-vulnerable nations issued renewed dire warnings just days after the United Nations released a groundbreaking report confirming that global temperatures will exceed the 1.5°C safe threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement within the next decade, driven by fossil fuel emissions from the world’s largest economies.

“Loss and damage is a reality that currently exists in my country,” said Vanuatu Climate Adaptation Minister Ralph Regenvanu Wednesday, speaking to reporters from the sweltering outdoor summit venue. “It will only accelerate with any overshoot, encompassing economic and non-economic losses that no finance can fully restore. This includes our ancestral lands, our heritage, our identity.”

For decades, Pacific island leaders have pressured major global greenhouse gas emitters to cut emissions enough to keep warming below 1.5°C, the threshold scientists identify as the line that would avoid the most catastrophic, irreversible impacts of climate change projected to occur if warming hits 2°C. The UN’s latest confirmation that the world will cross the 1.5°C mark in the coming years, even with temporary overshoot and efforts to cool the planet afterward, comes as too little, too late for these at-risk nations.

Beyond the immediate threat of submerged coastlines and displaced communities, regional scientific body the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) warns that warmer ocean temperatures will devastate the Pacific’s $multi-billion tuna fishing industry, which supplies 30% of the world’s global tuna catch, as well as the mangrove ecosystems that support juvenile fish populations. Already, the 2024 El Niño event has triggered extreme drought in some parts of the Pacific and catastrophic flooding in others, a pattern scientists project will only intensify as the planet warms.

“There is no other way out,” said Maina Talia, Tuvalu’s Minister for Climate Change. “The only way out for us is to ensure that we continue to push for 1.5, to stay alive, to stay in our countries.”

Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr., this year’s summit host, used his opening address to push back against the pattern of major global powers prioritizing geopolitical influence over climate action in the strategically vital Pacific region. Whipps argued that major powers seeking a foothold in the region should redirect their efforts toward funding climate adaptation and mitigation projects, backing his call with a goal to make Palau the world’s first nation powered entirely by renewable energy.

Despite Whipps’ appeal, longstanding geopolitical tensions quickly overshadowed opening proceedings, when diplomatic envoys from Beijing and Taipei were seated in the same row during the opening ceremony, rekindling the cross-strait rivalry that frequently distracts from climate action at regional summits. Geopolitical jostling is far from the only obstacle, however: a region-managed climate fund, the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), designed to deliver fast, direct funding for grassroots adaptation projects across the Pacific, has failed to secure the pledged funding from major global donors.

While some donors have cited governance concerns about the PRF, which will be headquartered in Tonga, regional leaders note the fund was intentionally designed to bypass the slow, rigid approval processes of traditional international financial institutions, which often delay critical aid for years while donors retain control over how funding is spent. For aid-dependent Pacific communities facing immediate climate threats, that delay is fatal. “International financial institutions have very lengthy, long processes to deliver the direct access funding that we require in the Pacific,” Tonga Prime Minister Fatafehi Fakafanua told the AP. “The PRF was purposefully designed to work immediately for the urgent needs of the Pacific Island people. That is something that differentiates the PRF from the existing financial models that we are using here in the Pacific.”

Tensions have also flared between the forum’s small island member states and its two largest, most powerful donor nations: Australia and New Zealand. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Palau Wednesday that his country’s transition away from fossil fuels could not happen overnight, and required expanded renewable energy capacity to be feasible. “Australia is highly regarded when it comes to climate change and the talking down of Australia doesn’t happen from outside Australia, I make that point,” Albanese said.

Just an hour later, Regenvanu pushed back on that claim, noting that as one of the world’s top fossil fuel exporters, Australia is still approving new fossil fuel expansion — a step that directly contradicts the needs of climate-vulnerable Pacific nations. “Australia is a major producer of fossil fuels,” Regenvanu said. “The very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion and it’s not doing that.”