Kumi Naidoo is the president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. He was secretary-general of Amnesty International from 2018 to 2020 and, from 2009 to 2015, the first person from the Global South to lead Greenpeace International.
For too long, Nepal has been seen mainly through the lens of climate vulnerability, as a country on the frontline of a crisis it did little to create. That reality cannot be ignored. But it is no longer the only story worth telling. Municipalities, young people, civil society groups and policymakers across the country are already building the case for a fair transition away from fossil fuels. Nepal should now turn that experience into international leadership.
That leadership is already visible locally. In 2021, Dhulikhel became the first city in the Global South to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, a global campaign for a treaty that would complement the Paris Agreement by ending fossil fuel expansion, managing a fair phase-out of existing production and speeding up the shift to renewable energy. Itahari followed a year later. Neither city has much say over global emissions. Both showed that a country does not need to be a major emitter to exercise major climate leadership.
Nepal’s national commitments point the same way. Under its third Nationally Determined Contribution, the country has pledged to strengthen renewable energy and efficiency policy, improve its energy security and energy mix by 2030, and help 400 local governments draw up and carry out municipal energy plans by 2035. Its long-term strategy sets a target of net-zero emissions by 2045, backed by the National Climate Change Policy, the Renewable Energy Subsidy Policy and institutions such as the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre. For a country that imports most of its fossil fuel, the shift to renewables, electric mobility, cleaner cooking and greater efficiency is not simply a climate obligation — it is a way to reduce dependence on volatile fuel imports and strengthen the economy at the same time.
Civil society is turning that ambition into something closer to a plan. The Nepal Coal Exit Program, launched by the SathSathai Foundation and Kathmandu University, has proposed a roadmap for phasing out coal while protecting the workers and industries that depend on it. “Phasing out fossil fuels isn’t a climate burden for Nepal, it’s an economic breakthrough,” says Prakash Lama of Clean Energy Nepal, who argues that Nepal can trade a costly dependence on imported fuel for the clean energy it already has in abundance, with civil society groups helping translate that shift into policy and community-level adoption.
Young people are insisting they have a stake in how this happens. At LCOY Nepal 2026, youth delegates called for a transition that creates dignified jobs and accounts for the inequalities that cut across gender, disability, Indigenous identity, geography and sexual orientation — one where they are treated as co-authors of climate policy rather than its beneficiaries. As Dikshya Subedi, founder of Youth Action for Sustainable and Eco Nepal and a co-organizer of LCOY 2026, put it, phasing out fossil fuels is not only about emissions targets — it is about who gets to shape what comes next.
Movements need more than good policy to sustain them. Pratik Karmacharya, director of Freedom Studio, put it simply: “People cannot live on outrage alone. What keeps a movement alive is art and culture.” From the melting ice of the Himalayas to the drought-hit plains of the Terai, artists and activists are working on the same struggle with different tools.
But Nepal’s experience also exposes what a climate-vulnerable country cannot do alone. Nations that contributed least to the crisis are often the ones facing the heaviest debt burdens, the least fiscal room and the highest cost of capital — even as they are asked to help finance a transition created largely by the historic emissions of wealthier economies.
Nepal made that argument directly at the first international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, held in Santa Marta, Colombia. Raju Sapkota, joint secretary and head of Nepal’s delegation, called on developed and high-emitting economies to phase out fossil fuels rapidly, in line with their historical responsibility and capacity to act. He said Nepal was ready to do its part, but that developing countries would need stronger international partnerships, fairer financial systems and legally binding cooperation if the transition was going to leave no one behind.
The treaty initiative I lead is trying to build some of that architecture. Alongside negotiating a fair phase-out of fossil fuels, it has proposed debt relief so that countries are not forced to choose between servicing debt and investing in climate resilience; a “buyers and sellers club” through which fossil fuel producers and consumers could coordinate an orderly decline in production; and a Journey Fund to help finance the transition in countries that commit to it.
The underlying principle is straightforward: countries with the greatest historical responsibility and the greatest capacity should move fastest, while those with fewer resources should get the finance, technology and policy space to develop cleanly without repeating the inequalities of the old system.
For Nepal, none of this is abstract. Glaciers are retreating, monsoon patterns are shifting, and communities in the Terai are already contending with drought. At the same time, the country has real renewable energy potential and a policy framework increasingly built around it.
The question is not whether Nepal’s economy is large enough to lead — climate leadership was never really about the size of an economy or a country’s share of global emissions. It comes, just as often, from countries that can see clearly both the unfairness of the current system and what a fairer one might look like. Nepal is in a position to help build a coalition of climate-vulnerable countries making a case that is both morally straightforward and practically necessary: they are ready to transition, provided the transition is fast, fair and funded.
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