- From protests to court rulings, for Nepal’s Indigenous peoples and local communities, 2025 was marked by activism and struggles to secure their forests, land and territories from infrastructure projects.
- As threats from hydropower, cable cars and mining projects increased, communities lost touch with their forest, lands and sacred connection with nature, which impacted biodiversity conservation.
- However, communities pushed legal action against these projects that operated without FPIC, community consultation, environmental regulation and safeguards.
As Indigenous peoples and local communities globally struggle to safeguard their rights over their land and forests, Nepal hasn’t been an exception.
In the face of socioeconomic and environmental threats, from infrastructure development projects including hydropower, cable car and mining, Nepal’s communities protested and took corporations to court to uphold their rights.
At COP30 in Belém this year, although Nepal’s Indigenous participation was minimal, the country’s delegation pushed for negotiations on climate finance for adaptation and secured inclusion of language surrounding mountain ecosystems in the Global Mutirão, the main outcome document of COP30.
Indigenous peoples (IPs) and local communities (LCs) in Nepal faced realities of infrastructure development and energy transition with growing cable car and hydropower projects that manifested in environmental harm, displacement, loss of ancestral lands and disturbance to sacred ties with nature. Here are some of the stories from the communities that Mongabay covered in 2025.
Nepal Indigenous leaders refile writ petition against hydropower project
Indigenous Bhote-Lhomi Singsa people refiled a writ petition in November at Nepal’s highest court against a hydropower project that has allegedly submitted a flawed EIA.
Community leaders initially filed a lawsuit in 2024 against the project which, according to the EIA, would directly impact Indigenous lands and communities in Chyamtang, Ridak and Thudam villages that depend on subsistence agriculture, yak herding and herbal medicine trade for their livelihoods. While the hydropower company has continued the construction work since the project started in 2021, felling more trees than cited in the EIA, communities revisited the court demanding the project’s cancellation.
In Nepal’s hills, a fight brews over the country’s biggest iron deposit
In Nepal’s remote far west, Indigenous and local communities struggled to resist “the country’s biggest” iron mining operation approved by the country’s government in the absence of the community’s free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). For communities in Jhumlabang in Rukum district that depend on farming, livestock and wild food collection, the proposed mining could severely impact their rivers, forests, farmlands and wildlife conservation while displacing them from their ancestral lands.
While community groups and Indigenous rights advocates reached a consensus in July to halt the project and argued that it violated the country’s obligations under international law to guarantee the right of Indigenous peoples, documents showed that the government-approved concession progressed to mine iron deposits in 750 hectares (1,853 acres), without the community’s consent and adequate compensation.
Cable car project in Nepal under fire for flawed environmental review
In 2025, the Pathibhara cable car project — planned in a sacred forest site of the Yakthung (Limbu) community — sparked outrage among the community people after the environmental assessment recorded the absence of key species found in the area, undermining the proper EIA of the area.
Indigenous peoples and local communities estimated that the project felled more than 40,000 trees, far exceeding the figures in the assessment report, and demanded the project’s cancellation. While the community’s continued protests turned violent with clashes between the locals and security forces, the Supreme Court ordered an immediate halt to project construction, which locals claimed to have threatened biodiversity and the community’s spiritual heritage.
Ousted Nepal govt cleared easier path for controversial cable cars, documents show
Amid the Gen Z protests in September that ignited Nepal’s political restructuring, the previous government granted national priority status to six commercial cable car projects, one including within the legally protected Annapurna Conservation Area. The decision granting national priority status to these cable car projects drew concerns and criticisms from Indigenous communities, lawyers and conservationists over the lack of community consultation and violation of the Supreme Court’s ruling that previously restricted infrastructure within the country’s protected areas.
As the interim government showed a lack of awareness of the decision, conservationists and lawyers viewed the new rule not only as instigating a lack of accountability and hurting community livelihoods but risking biodiversity hotspots and creating long-term conservation threats.
Development banks under fire for backing disputed Nepal hydropower project
In a flurry of hydropower projects aiming to generate about 28,500 megawatts by 2035 in Nepal, the Tanahu Hydropower project was among the most controversial projects Mongabay reported on in 2025. According to a rights watchdog, half the complaints against hydropower projects in the country were linked to the Tanahu project that received funding from the Asian Development Bank, European Investment Bank and World Bank.
Indigenous Magar community and civil society leaders reported environmental harms, land rights violations, a lack of community consultation since the project’s inception, and inadequate compensation for relocation, while emphasizing the government and development banks’ lack of due diligence, leaving communities in the lurch.
Nepal sees positive outcome from reforestation project using local knowledge
As reports of projects impacting forests, Indigenous peoples and local communities frequently made headlines, a reforestation project that integrated local ecological knowledge of Indigenous and local communities in Nepal showed promise. The communities in six study sites across the western Gandaki province planted 131,186 trees of 44 native species on about 76 hectares (187 acres) of government-owned land.
A decade after the project’s completion, satellite imagery showed the density of vegetation on the study sites increased significantly between 2018 and 2022, thanks to the community people’s use of local ecological knowledge in sustainable reforestation.
Banner image: A Magar local affected by the Tanahu Hydropower project. Image by Sanjog Laapaa Magar, INWOLAG.
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