On August 26, a glacier collapsed in the Himalayas, triggering devastating floods across Nepal. More than 1,300 people have died and thousands are still missing. Entire communities have been affected, infrastructure has been destroyed, and the country now faces a long and costly process of rebuilding. But what happened in Nepal is not only a story about a natural disaster in a country on the other side of the world, it is a story about responsibility, power and the increasingly uncomfortable question of who is actually paying for the consequences of the climate crisis.
Nepal contributes very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is among the countries most exposed to the consequences of a warming planet. The contrast becomes difficult to ignore when you look at the numbers. Nepal accounts for roughly 0.05% of global CO₂ emissions, while the United States accounts for around 13%. If we look at cumulative emissions since the beginning of the industrial era, the difference becomes even more striking: the United States is responsible for almost a quarter of historical global CO₂ emissions, while Nepal's contribution is almost negligible.
This is one of the strongest contradictions at the centre of the climate crisis: the countries and communities that have contributed the least to global warming are often among those facing its most immediate consequences, while much of the wealth that was generated through decades of carbon-intensive growth remains concentrated elsewhere.
We tend to approach this problem through the individual. We are told to consume less, travel differently, recycle more, buy sustainable products and make better choices. There is nothing wrong with any of that. Individual behaviour matters, and pretending otherwise would be another convenient excuse.
But there is a problem when individual responsibility becomes the dominant way we talk about climate change: it can make an inherently unequal problem look like an equally shared one.
A person deciding whether to take a flight or a train has some responsibility. An energy company deciding where to invest billions of dollars has a very different kind of responsibility. A consumer can choose what to buy, but a government decides the rules under which entire industries operate. An individual can reduce their own emissions, but they cannot decide how a country's electricity is generated, how infrastructure is built, where capital flows or whether an industry is regulated.
Responsibility should therefore be connected to power, and the more influence an organisation has over the conditions that shape our collective impact, the greater its responsibility should be to change those conditions.
Our responsibility is not simply to become better consumers and constantly measure the environmental cost of our own choices, but to demand more from the institutions that have the ability to change the system itself. To expect governments to act with the urgency that the scale of the crisis requires and companies to take responsibility for the environmental consequences of their operations rather than shifting that responsibility onto consumers. To expect those that have benefited most from decades of emissions to contribute more to protecting the communities that now have to adapt to their consequences.
That is not about asking for corporate goodwill but for accountability.
Climate justice should not be treated as a generous extra that governments and organisations can choose to support when circumstances allow. If climate change is already determining where people can live, how communities can survive and how countries have to spend their resources, then having some say over how that crisis is addressed should be understood as a fundamental right. At the very least, it should be treated as one.
Nepal makes that argument particularly difficult to ignore. A country that contributed almost nothing to the accumulation of global emissions is being forced to spend enormous resources dealing with the consequences of a problem created largely elsewhere. Asking Nepal to simply adapt, rebuild and move on is not a solution. It is a transfer of the cost from those who had the greatest role in creating the problem to those with the least capacity to absorb it.
The truth is that individual responsibility is important precisely because it is not enough: we should ask ourselves who has the power to change what we cannot. And once we know the answer, demanding that those actors use that power responsibly is not radical, it is the most basic form of accountability.
Because the people in Nepal who are now paying the price for a changing climate did not choose the system that produced it. The question is not whether they should have made better choices, the question is why they should have to pay for ours.