Imlisanen Jamir
Sometime in the weeks ahead, a road in Nagaland’s hill districts will be washed out. This is not a prediction requiring any particular insight. It happens most monsoon seasons, and it will happen again after that, and when it does the district administration will issue a statement and a contractor will eventually be summoned and the people who depend on that road will wait. The state has a Disaster Management Plan. It has had several. What it does not have, and has never had, is the money to build roads that do not wash out, or the institutional will to treat each year’s flooding as something other than an act of God requiring patient endurance.
In France, around the last week of June, the national health authority counted roughly a thousand excess deaths from a heatwave that meteorologists said would have been virtually impossible without decades of fossil fuel emissions. Temperatures reached 44.3 degrees Celsius in parts of the country, the highest since records began in 1947. Ambulances answered over 120,000 calls. The European press gave the event the coverage it deserved, and world leaders expressed concern, and scientists produced attribution studies with admirable speed confirming what they had been saying for thirty years.
The connection between these two events is not coincidental. It is causal, and the causality runs in one direction. The industrialised world burned coal and oil through the better part of two centuries, accumulated the wealth that burning made possible, and in doing so altered the atmospheric conditions under which the rest of the world now tries to survive. The landslides in Nagaland, the failed harvests in the Sahel, the displacement of coastal communities across South and Southeast Asia are not misfortunes. Rather, they are, in the clinical language of climate science, loss and damage: measurable, attributable harm suffered by people who contributed almost nothing to the conditions that produced it.
There is, as it happens, a fund for this. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage was agreed at COP27 in 2022 and declared operational at COP29 in Baku. By late 2025, it had collected pledges of approximately $817 million. The estimated cost of climate-related loss and damage to vulnerable nations by 2030 is $580 billion. The fund covers, by rough arithmetic, about one-seventh of one percent of projected need. The United States withdrew its pledge of $17.5 million early in 2025. The remaining contributors left replenishment to the discretion of rich countries, which is another way of saying it was left to goodwill.
India has made its displeasure with this arrangement known at successive COP summits, invoking Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement and speaking on behalf of the Like-Minded Developing Countries with considerable rhetorical force. After COP30 in Belem, the Environment Minister announced that India had achieved all its major goals and that the summit was a significant milestone in advancing equity and climate justice. Meanwhile, India’s own National Adaptation Fund on Climate Change, which financed projects against floods, landslides, and droughts across the country’s most vulnerable states, had its budget dried up entirely since 2023-24. The projects stalled. The communities they were meant to protect rebuilt on their own, as they had before.
The architecture of global climate finance is, in this sense, a remarkably honest institution. It reflects with precision the actual priorities of the governments that designed it: enough procedure to demonstrate seriousness, enough pledging to generate headlines, and enough ambiguity in the replenishment mechanisms to ensure that the money never quite arrives at the scale required. Nagaland will not appear in the attribution studies. Its losses are too small, too dispersed, too poorly documented to register in the models. The road will be washed out, and repaired, eventually, and the next monsoon will come.
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