There is a genre of United Nations speech in which a leader from a poor country stands at the rostrum in New York and explains, politely, that his country’s catastrophe is also everyone else’s. It is a well-established genre. It has its own rhythms, its own applause, its own filing system. On Thursday night, Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah delivered one, and he had the misfortune of bringing fresh material.
Addressing the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, Shah described the flood that tore through his country last month. It “was not just a local tragedy,” he said, but “a warning to the world” — and then he put the question that the whole speech was built around:
Have you really heard that warning?
The warning itself was not subtle. The flood that struck Nepal on August 26 was, according to Britannica, triggered by a partial glacier collapse and destroyed thousands of structures. CNN reported that at least 469 people were killed, with destroyed bridges and houses buried in mud.
Shah’s appeal was directed at world leaders: act on climate change. The thrust of his argument, as the AP reported, is that a warming world keeps hurting people who did not cause the crisis and are now the ones who need help. Nepal sits under the Himalayas, contributes very little to the emissions doing the melting, and gets buried by the runoff. As demonstrations of the problem go, it is hard to improve on. As demonstrations that anyone is listening go, the historical record is less encouraging.
The honest answer to Shah’s question is the one he already knew: everyone in that hall has heard this warning many times, and the warning has been incorporated, gracefully, into the schedule. Summits are held. Targets are announced. The applause lasts about as long as it takes for the next delegation to reach the lectern. Then the water comes again, somewhere else, to people who had no say in any of it.
Glaciers do not send delegations. They send floods, and the floods keep arriving on time.