UN fund may reserve $20m for Nepal after floods — Climate Home News
The Board of the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) will consider on October 22 the possibility of preliminarily reserving $20 million for Nepal, which was hit by floods in August. As Climate Home News reports, the issue will be put before the fund’s first extraordinary board meeting.
A draft decision was prepared by a group of board members from developed and developing countries. The document provides that the Nepalese government must submit a proposal on how to use the funds, after which the fund’s board will decide at one of its regular meetings whether to approve it.
Pilot mechanism for emergency requests
The draft decision states that Nepal’s appeal will serve as a pilot for submitting applications outside the fund’s current schedule. Such a mechanism could potentially allow governments to request funding shortly after climate disasters rather than wait for the next call for applications.
Until now, the FRLD had accepted requests only through one call for applications announced at the COP30 climate conference in Belém last November. Countries were given six months to submit applications. The fund is currently considering around 180 projects, most of which concern preventing damage from future climate disasters, including strengthening flood response in Bangladesh and Lagos.
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Scale of destruction
Nepalese officials described the possible $20 million as a rather symbolic sum against the estimated $4.8 billion cost of recovery and reconstruction. At the same time, this would be the first case in which the new fund reserves money for a specific disaster.
On August 26, a collapse of ice and rock caused a flow of water and debris through Nepal and the Tibet region administered by China. According to the publication, more than 1,400 people were killed, while thousands more were considered missing. The disaster also destroyed homes, bridges, roads and hydropower plants.
The FRLD was agreed at COP27 in 2022, and its work was launched at COP28 in 2023. The fund has not yet allocated money under any application: the requests it is considering are estimated at about $2.8 billion, while the available funding totals $350 million.
