Climate finance and green growth: reconsidering climate-related institutions, investments, and priorities in Nepal

Nepal, a least-developed, mountainous, and land-locked country is consistently ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries to the climate change. Poor socioeconomic 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 the past decade, Nepal has made significant progress, particularly in developing and implementing policies and frameworks and establishing institutional mechanisms with the support of donor countries, UN and multilateral agencies. As the global climate politics is getting 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. Using the data and information currently available, we analyze 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 and other related bilateral and multilateral sources particularly European countries, 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.