Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Nepal, a least developed, mountainous and land-locked country is consistently ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries to the climate change. Poor socio-economic development, rough and highly unstable geography, inadequate institutional capacity to deal with research, development and policy and mostly underdeveloped infrastructures, all have contributed to increasing vulnerability of communities and ecosystems, and have limited their adaptive capacity. Over past decade, Nepal has made significant progress in some of these areas, particularly in developing and implementing policies and frameworks, and establishing institutional mechanisms with the support of donor countries, UN and multilateral agencies, and will continue to access technologies and financial resources for next level actions, i.e. climate-proof and resilient socio-economic development. As the global climate politics is getting much more complicated, international financing patterns – both climate and development finance - are shifting their ways, forcing the countries like Nepal to diversify the funding base for climate change actions and integrate them within national development plans and strategies. In this paper, using the data and information currently available, we analyse the existing financing situations, discuss the future scenarios and suggest policy recommendations to develop a set of long-term adaptation and impact mitigation strategies in specific and environmental change at large. When short-term adaptation strategies funded from existing financial arrangements seem to be encouraging, we stress the need of “public-private partnership driven full-fledged green economy” focusing on renewable energy and transport, agriculture and forestry, water and water-induced disasters, as well as tourism and hospitality.