The COVID-19 pandemic has affected humankind worldwide, slowing down and even reversing the progress made in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It has negatively impacted most SDGs but with positive impacts on a few. We discuss some initial impacts observed and explores potential impacts on the achievement of SDGs for Nepal. The study followed a knowledge co-creation process with experts from various professional backgrounds, involving five steps: online survey, online workshop, assessment of expert’s opinions, review and validation, and revision and synthesis. The pandemic has restricting impacts on the progress of most SDGs. However, it has also opened a window of opportunity for sustainable transformation. Many of the negative impacts may subside in the medium and long terms. The negative impacts on SDGs resulted from factors linked to the pandemic or the measures taken to control it. The key five impending factors are lockdowns, underemployment and unemployment, closure of institutions and facilities, diluted focus and funds for non-COVID-19 issues, and anticipated reduced support from development partners. The generated transformative opportunities are lessons learned for planning and actions, socio-economic recovery plan, use of information and communication technologies and impetus to the digital economy, reverse migration and ‘brain gain,’ and local governments’ exercising authorities. For sustainable transformation, the window to grasp these opportunities is short-lived and will get narrow over time, i.e., before rebounds occur following the past trajectories.

River systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB region will be affected by considerable (yet poorly quantified) changes to the seasonality and composition of runoff in the future, which are likely to have considerable impacts on these supplies. Given how directly and indirectly communities and ecosystems are dependent on these resources and the growing pressure on them due to ever-increasing demands, the impacts of climate change pose considerable adaptation challenges. The strong linkages between hydroclimate, cryosphere, water resources, and human activities within the UIB suggest that a multi- and inter-disciplinary research approach integrating the social and natural/environmental sciences is critical for successful adaptation to ongoing and future hydrological and climate change. Here we use a horizon scanning technique to identify the Top 100 questions related to the most pressing knowledge gaps and research priorities in social and natural sciences on climate change and water in the UIB. These questions are on the margins of current thinking and investigation and are clustered into 14 themes, covering three overarching topics of ‘governance, policy, and sustainable solutions’, ‘socioeconomic processes and livelihoods’, and ‘integrated Earth System processes’. Raising awareness of these cutting-edge knowledge gaps and opportunities will hopefully encourage researchers, funding bodies, practitioners, and policy makers to address them.