Nepal, Sept. 25 -- She is somewhere in her early fifties. One morning, she lost fourteen members of her family.

She was smiling when she told me this.

I want to be precise about that smile because I haven't been able to think about anything else since. It was neither calm nor acceptance. It was the expression a person adopts when there is nothing left to arrange. She held it steady as she spoke, the way you hold a door shut against the wind.

No budget line in any damage assessment covers that smile; no fund can be submitted to, and no ministry can evaluate whether it ever heals. In the language of climate finance, she is an externality.

On the morning of August 26, bedrock and glacial ice broke away at about 5,200 metres near the Lang...