Nepal, Sept. 18 -- Nepal continues to occupy one of the most strategically sensitive geopolitical spaces in Asia, wedged between two nuclear powers who watch its domestic politics with keen interest. The country contributes around 0.1 percent to the global greenhouse gas emissions. These two facts rarely appear in the same sentence, but they should.

A country that pollutes insignificantly is now paying for a warming planet with landslides and glacial floods. It is the same country that controls almost none of its own regional strategic weather, yet is expected to hold an even keel between Beijing and New Delhi. The world watches as a small, landlocked, mountainous state attempts to survive being squeezed from two fronts at once: by emerg...