CWA # 2228

Global Politics Explainer

Nepal, Climate disasters and Gender:

How Nepal's disaster response has left its gender minorities behind

Climate vulnerability is not a separate problem for Nepals gender minorities. It is another dimension added to a marginalisation that already exists.

Namrata L Ghanghatkar 11 August 2026

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On 23 July 2026, Nepal News reported on how climate disasters magnify the daily struggles of sexual and gender minorities in Nepal. It is considered among the ten countries most affected by climate disasters between 2000 and 2019. 

Nepal’s Supreme Court recognised a third gender in law in 2007, among the earliest such rulings anywhere else in the world. Nepal’s sexual and gender minority community, an umbrella spanning LGBTQ and other identities, is estimated at 900,000 people; no census count has verified this figure. In September 2024, monsoon flooding killed 246 people and displaced more than 10,800 households nationwide. The flooding remains one of the country’s deadliest disasters. Nepal’s disaster planning has never tracked how this community specifically was affected by that flood, or by any other.

Where does the vulnerability to disaster actually start for Nepal’s gender minorities?
Climate vulnerability is not a separate problem for Nepal’s gender minorities. It is another dimension added to a marginalisation that already exists. The vulnerability that shapes how someone survives a flood or a heatwave is established years before the disaster, through ordinary social rejection that has nothing to do with climate. Coming out, or simply being identified, can cost a person their place in their family home. It can cost them any realistic access to formal employment too. This pushes many toward informal daily wage work and toward land that is cheap because it floods, sits low or was never formally registered. Landlords outside Kathmandu have been reported to refuse tenancy to transgender applicants outright once their identity becomes apparent, alongside exclusion from education and public services more broadly. Whatever a person’s specific identity within the community, the buffers most households rely on when disaster hits, savings, land title, a place to return to - are undoubtedly what years of this kind of exclusion tend to strip away first.

Disaster relief and the gender minorities: Where is the issue?
Nepal’s disaster response relies on informal community ties and local social standing. Officials and volunteers work out who needs help by asking who belongs. That system serves people still embedded in village and family life. It fails all those already pushed out of that life. This is not an oversight, but that is how the system was built. Paperwork worsens it. Many citizenship certificates still carry a name or gender a person no longer uses, since the 2007 ruling has never been applied consistently. At a bank counter, a hospital desk, or a relief distribution point, that mismatch invites suspicion rather than aid. Many people stop asking for help they are legally owed.

Is anyone accounting, and who carries the heaviest weight?
No one is, not really. The government does not track how disasters affect sexual and gender minorities; neither do most aid organisations. A 2021 review of Nepal’s climate policies, led by ICIMOD, UN Women and the UN Environment Programme, found that gender in practice means women. Everyone else disappears into the language of inclusion without ever being named in it. Dalit and Indigenous members of the community carry an added weight of caste and class discrimination on top of this. Some community groups have tried to fill the gap themselves, running tree planting and flood awareness drives in vulnerable neighbourhoods. The effort is real, but the scale is not.

What has the 2007 ruling actually changed?
Less than it should have. It remains a genuine achievement, but a legal category is not a delivery mechanism. A name on a citizenship card is not a system built to reach the person behind it. Whether someone survives the next monsoon with their home, livelihood, and dignity intact still depends on relief networks and data collection that were never designed with them in mind. They continue to operate that way, by default rather than by decision. Changing this means treating sexual and gender minorities, across the full range of who that includes, as a category disaster planning must account for. Not as one assumes it has already covered.

References
Manika Bishwakarma, “Climate disasters magnify the daily struggles of sexual and gender minorities,” Nepal News, 23 July 2026.

“Nepal introduces ‘others’ gender category in latest census,” Al Jazeera, 29 September 2021.

Ryan Thoreson, “We Have to Beg So Many People: Human Rights Violations in Nepal’s Legal Gender Recognition Practices,” Human Rights Watch, 15 February 2024.

About the author

Namrata L Ghanghatkar is a postgraduate student at the Department of Public Policy, Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bengaluru. She is currently a research intern at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS).