Nepal Is Paying for a Climate Crisis It Barely Created

More than a thousand people are dead after the catastrophic floods in Nepal. Thousands remain missing. Villages have been destroyed. Roads, bridges and hydroelectric projects have been swept away.

It is easy to call this a natural disaster. But to understand why this happened, and why countries like Nepal increasingly face disasters they did little to create, we have to understand climate change as a question of capitalism and imperialism.

What is climate change?

The Earth receives heat from the Sun. Some of that heat goes back out into space. But certain gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide and methane, trap part of that heat and stop it from escaping quickly. These are called greenhouse gases. This natural effect is necessary for life. Without it, the Earth would be too cold.

The problem is that we have released enormous extra amounts of these gases by burning coal, oil and gas for factories, electricity, transport and industrial production. The more greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped.

So the planet becomes warmer. And when the planet becomes warmer, it affects much more than temperature. Oceans heat up. Ice melts. Sea levels rise. Rainfall changes. Heatwaves become stronger. Droughts can become longer. Heavy rainfall can become more destructive.

In mountains like the Himalayas, warming also melts glaciers and frozen ground that help hold rock and ice together. Climate change therefore does not simply mean hotter weather. It means that many of the natural systems human society depends on are becoming less stable.

What happened in Nepal?

On August 26, a huge section of glacier, ice and rock collapsed high in the Himalayas near the Nepal-Tibet border. The mass fell more than a kilometer down the mountain. It became an avalanche of rock, ice, mud and water. It entered the river system and produced a devastating flash flood that travelled downstream through Nepal.

Entire settlements and major infrastructure were destroyed. More than 1,000 people have now died, while thousands remain missing. This cannot be considered simply as a natural disaster. As temperatures rise, Himalayan glaciers retreat. Ice that once helped support mountain slopes disappears. Frozen ground thaws. Meltwater enters cracks in rock. The relationship between rock, ice and water becomes increasingly unstable.

Scientists studying the Nepal disaster say climate change is creating exactly the conditions that make catastrophic failures like this of high-mountain rock and ice more likely. 

The Himalayas are being transformed by a warming planet. Capitalism created the crisis. The modern climate crisis developed alongside industrial capitalism.  Capitalism has one basic requirement: capital must grow.

A capitalist invests money in order to receive more money. Companies that stop expanding are defeated by competitors that produce more cheaply, find new markets and accumulate faster. So capitalism constantly demands more production, more extraction, more transportation and more energy.

For two centuries, coal, oil and gas supplied the enormous quantities of energy required for this expansion. Marx understood the destructive logic long before climate change was understood scientifically. In Capital, he wrote that capitalist production advances by:

“sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.”

Marx was writing about industrial agriculture. But the principle is much wider.

Under capitalism, forests, coal, oil, land and even human labour are treated mainly according to the value that can be extracted from them.

A forest becomes timber to be sold. Coal and oil become fuel for production. Workers become a source of labour from which profit can be made.

This does not depend on whether individual capitalists are personally greedy. The system itself pushes them to keep extracting, producing and expanding in order to survive competition.

The capitalist who leaves oil underground while a competitor extracts and sells it loses.

The destruction is therefore bigger than the greed of individual capitalists. The system itself rewards accumulation and punishes restraint. Climate change is one of the results. Imperialism decides who benefits and who pays Capitalism did not develop evenly across the world.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that capitalism had entered a new stage. Large firms had swallowed smaller competitors, banks had become deeply tied to industry, and enormous concentrations of finance capital had emerged.

He called imperialism: “the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

For Lenin, imperialism was not simply one powerful country behaving badly toward another. It was a stage of capitalism in which concentrated capital could no longer remain within national borders. It had to search internationally for new markets, raw materials, workers and places to invest.

This shaped the development of the modern world. The industrial powers did not become wealthy only through what happened inside Europe and North America. Colonialism allowed them to draw land, minerals, agricultural goods and labour from Asia, Africa and Latin America into their own process of accumulation.

The colonies were not permitted to develop according to their own needs. Their economies were reorganised around the needs of capital elsewhere.

That history matters enormously when we talk about climate change. The countries that industrialised earliest burned coal, oil and gas on an enormous scale while building their industries, transport systems, cities and military power. They used a disproportionate share of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon while also accumulating the wealth produced through this development.

Countries such as Nepal entered the modern world economy from a completely different position. They did not receive an equal share of the wealth created by two centuries of fossil-fueled development. But they now live under the same altered atmosphere.

This is the contradiction. The benefits of capitalist development were concentrated unequally, while the consequences of the carbon released through that development are global.

And even today, the inequality continues. Production can be moved to poorer countries because labour is cheaper. Minerals can be extracted there. Factories can produce goods for consumers elsewhere. The pollution and emissions may be recorded in the country where production takes place, while a large part of the profit flows to companies, banks and investors located elsewhere.

So simply comparing the emissions of one country with another can hide the actual relations of production behind them. This is why climate change becomes an imperialist question.

Nepal has contributed very little to the accumulation of carbon now warming the planet. Yet it faces collapsing glaciers, unstable mountains, destroyed infrastructure and enormous reconstruction costs.

The same world economy that concentrated wealth in one part of the world has left another part with far fewer resources to protect itself from the ecological consequences.

Imperialism therefore helps us understand not only who produced most of the crisis, but also why some countries have far greater power to survive it than others. India will face some of the worst effects of climate change  

For Indian workers, climate change is already a question of life, health and livelihood. India is especially vulnerable because hundreds of millions of people work outdoors or in workplaces without adequate cooling. Agriculture, construction, transport, factories, mines and street work all become more dangerous as heat and humidity rise.

The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change found that in 2024, the average person in India experienced 19.8 days of heatwave conditions. It estimates that 6.6 of those days would not have occurred without climate change.

The effect on labour is already enormous.

The World Bank estimates that by 2030, 160 to 200 million people in India could be exposed to lethal heatwaves every year, while heat stress and falling productivity could threaten around 34 million jobs.

Heat is only one danger. India has thousands of kilometres of coastline and some of its largest cities sit close to the sea. A 2025 study estimated that more than 40 million people in India could be exposed to coastal inundation by 2050 as sea levels rise. Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai are among the major cities facing serious long-term flood risks.

The Himalayas face another kind of danger. Rising temperatures are melting glaciers and thawing frozen mountain ground, increasing the danger of landslides, glacier collapses and sudden floods. What happened in Nepal therefore matters directly to workers in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and other Himalayan regions as well.

Climate change will affect different classes very differently.

A wealthy person can work in an air-conditioned office, live in a better-protected house, buy insurance and temporarily leave an area during extreme weather. A construction worker cannot stop working every time the temperature becomes dangerous. A farmer cannot move their land. A street vendor cannot take their workplace indoors. A fishing community cannot simply abandon the coast.

This is why climate change is already becoming a major working-class question in India. The people who have contributed the least to the crisis are often the people who have the least protection from it.

Why Marxists cannot take climate change lightly?

For Marxists, climate change cannot be left as an issue that will be addressed by the environmental organisations.

Because, workers will suffer first from extreme heat. Peasants will suffer from changing rainfall and crop failures. Working-class neighbourhoods will suffer most from floods. Poor countries will lose infrastructure they spent generations building. And when reconstruction comes, workers will again be asked to pay through debt, taxes, austerity and cuts to public spending.

Meanwhile, the capitalist system that created the crisis will try to turn even the transition away from fossil fuels into another field for private accumulation. Our answer therefore cannot simply be to consume differently.

We need public control over energy, planned decarbonisation, massive investment in public infrastructure, climate adaptation led by workers and communities, cancellation of unjust debt, and climate reparations from the states and corporations most responsible for historical emissions.

And above all, we need internationalism. A worker in Nepal did not create the conditions that destroyed their village. Neither did a factory worker in Britain, the United States or India. The responsibility lies in a system organised around endless accumulation and a world order that concentrates its benefits while pushing its costs downward. Marxism teaches us to ask a simple question whenever catastrophe strikes:

Who produced the wealth, who accumulated it, and who was made to pay?

Nepal gives us a terrible answer. Climate change is already here. For the international working class, the struggle against it must become part of the struggle against capitalism and imperialism themselves.

• Amudhu