Nepal is a warning: Climate adaptation must become a global priority

After Nepal’s flash flood in the last week of August, I sought to get first-person accounts of the tragedy. I wanted to learn how People’s Courage International, the non-profit I lead, can better support and design climate-resilience interventions grounded in affected communities’ priorities. Tek Singh, my colleague in Nepal, facilitated a phone call with Sundari Tamang from Rasuwa, the district severely damaged by the floods.

“I lost my brother, sister and our home,” she told me over the phone through a patchy connection. “We got a warning from the authorities only five minutes before the water struck.”

Sundari had been displaced by a disaster before, having lost her last home, also in Rasuwa, in the 2015 Nepal earthquake. She was subsequently resettled not far away, in the village of Khalte, where she rebuilt her life.

Her account brings forth a fundamental question. Are we simply helping people rebuild stop-gap homes after every disaster, or are we helping them rebuild ones where they can remain safe for the next 20-30 years?

Uddhab Raj Awasthi, a programme manager working with the Karnali Integrated Rural Development and Research Centre in the area, told me Sundari’s losses were part of a much wider challenge. He talked about how families are still searching for missing relatives and how communities have lost many of the young workers needed for disaster recovery. Beyond relief, major challenges include lack of permanent housing and the loss of livelihoods.

Nepal is not isolated in its predicament. In 2026 alone, extreme heat, floods, drought and wildfires have affected communities across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. In India and Pakistan, temperatures exceeded 46C in multiple cities in April and May, exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous heat. World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration of climate scientists, found that human-induced climate change made the April heatwave roughly three times more likely and about 1C hotter. In Assam, severe floods affected more than half a million people, claiming at least 99 lives and submerging more than 45,000 hectares of cropland.

Last year, the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) recorded 358 natural hazard-related disasters worldwide, affecting 110.2 million people, causing over 16,600 deaths and nearly USD 170 billion in economic losses.  

Many of these risks can be anticipated. This means many of their human consequences can also be reduced.

Nepal is not isolated in its predicament. In 2026 alone, extreme heat, floods, drought and wildfires have affected communities across Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. In India and Pakistan, temperatures exceeded 46C in multiple cities in April and May, exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous heat. World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration of climate scientists, found that human-induced climate change made the April heatwave roughly three times more likely and about 1C hotter. In Assam, severe floods affected more than half a million people, claiming at least 99 lives and submerging more than 45,000 hectares of cropland.

Last year, the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) recorded 358 natural hazard-related disasters worldwide, affecting 110.2 million people, causing over 16,600 deaths and nearly USD 170 billion in economic losses.  

Many of these risks can be anticipated. This means many of their human consequences can also be reduced.

Making adaptation core infrastructure

Globally, climate hazards affect communities and populations unequally. Climate disasters become human disasters when they meet poverty, insecure livelihoods, weak infrastructure and inadequate social protection. The same hazard can be a temporary disruption for one family and a lifetime setback for another, depending on their ability to prepare, cope and recover.

This is why we need both mitigation and greater climate adaptation. Our financing and attention, however, have not reflected that balance.

Global climate finance reached about USD 2 trillion in 2024, yet only around USD 64 billion was tracked as being for adaptation, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that developing countries will need USD 310-365 billion annually for adaptation by 2035. But there was only USD 26 billion in international public adaptation finance in 2023.

This is more than just a finance gap. It is a protection gap.

Governments must begin treating adaptation as essential public infrastructure instead of depending on such financing. For one, early warning systems should reach the last mile, and Sundari’s experience illustrates this. She should have received a clear warning early enough for her family to evacuate, with directions to a safe location and support to get there. Warnings must also reach remote and marginalised communities in accessible languages and formats.

Governments and organisations should also devise plans to protect people from extreme weather, and distribute anticipatory finance that releases support before and immediately after predictable shocks, rather than wait for a new appeal after disaster strikes.

Globally, we already see some examples of these. In Bangladesh, the United Nations’ World Food Programme uses forecasts and predefined triggers to provide anticipatory cash before severe floods. These offer families time and resources to buy food, protect essential belongings and move to safer places. In India, the heat action plans of cities like Ahmedabad combine heat warnings, public awareness and health system preparedness, and specify protections for outdoor workers. Japan’s advanced early warning systems include weather radar, automated observation stations and forecasting models that help authorities issue local warnings, and aid communities in preparing for earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme weather.

In Mozambique, the government, supported by partners including the UN, World Bank and World Meteorological Organization, has strengthened forecasting, community warnings and evacuation systems to reduce deaths and losses from tropical cyclones. And in Vietnam, mangrove restoration is providing longer-term protection against storms and coastal flooding while supporting livelihoods.

Designing products around climate risk

Households and small businesses should be helped to absorb shocks from disasters without selling productive assets or falling deeper into debt. Emergency credit, savings, parametric insurance – which pays a pre-agreed amount when an event reaches a pre-defined threshold – and flexible repayment can aid them in this.

In India, People’s Courage International (PCI), which advances social protection and climate resilience for migrant and informal workers, has developed multi-peril climate insurance, while in Bangladesh it has developed parametric cyclone insurance for exposed communities.

Philanthropy also has an important role to play. Such capital can take risks commercial capital often cannot, as well as back local organisations, test new approaches, and generate evidence for governments and development institutions to scale. For instance, with PCI’s climate insurance work, funding can help us test the design of our offering, its affordability, and delivery to informal workers, and establish whether payouts protect livelihoods. ClimateWorks Foundation reported that foundation funding for climate adaptation and resilience reached a record USD 870 million in 2024, but this remains far below what is needed.

Meanwhile, development institutions must integrate climate risk into their agriculture, livelihoods, health, housing, poverty reduction and women’s economic empowerment programmes. They must ensure programmes financed today are able to survive the climate of tomorrow.

But scaling adaptation is not only about how much finance is available. It is also about who controls the finance. Too much funding remains concentrated in large institutions, leaving local organisations with less influence over priorities. This also weakens adaptation by overlooking local knowledge and needs, as well as reducing community participation.

Governments, development institutions and philanthropic foundations should make more flexible, long-term finance directly accessible to local organisations and communities and give them a meaningful role in deciding how it is used.

Vulnerable does not mean powerless

Communities are already adapting to climate change by changing crops, working hours and livelihoods. In Bangladesh, some communities are also making use of informal social networks to share weather warnings and help neighbours take protective action.

Adaptation should strengthen such efforts and build on these communities’ knowledge and choices. What they lack is adequate resources and protection.

The examples above, from Bangladesh to Japan and Mozambique, also show that adaptation requires short- and long-term solutions.

Early warnings, heat action plans, evacuation systems, anticipatory cash and emergency support can save lives in the immediate term. Climate-resilient housing and infrastructure, stronger disaster risk institutions, ecosystem restoration, social protection and financial protection, like insurance, can reduce vulnerability over time.

Short-term measures help people survive the next shock; long-term measures ensure they don’t lose everything again.

Adaptation is fundamental to development. It shouldn’t be a separate environmental agenda sitting in an individual environmental programme. Climate shocks can erase years of progress in areas like poverty reduction and women’s economic empowerment. Protecting those gains must become part of how development is financed and delivered.

For Sundari, adaptation is the difference between whether or not a warning reaches her early enough to act, whether the next home she builds is somewhere she can remain safe, and after being displaced twice, whether she has the protection and resources to rebuild without having to start over after the next disaster.

We have spent decades asking how to stop climate change. We must now ask with equal urgency how we protect those living through it.