Nepal flood disaster: An alert for Southasia and the world

Southasia’s ability to respond to disasters catalysed by the human-induced change to natural systems has been compromised by its geopolitical divisions.

SOME PEOPLE, particularly outside Nepal, have rushed into a geopolitical blame game even before the slurry on the Bhotekoshi River has had time to dry, even as people are being rescued from flooded tunnels in the worst-affected Rasuwa district, and even while the death toll rises as more bodies are found far downstream or recovered from the sludge. If there is a need to assign culpability, we must search for it far from the Langtang Lirung massif of Nepal, part of whose northern flank collapsed to trigger the cascade of calamity on the morning of 26 August.

Accountability will have to be apportioned between the Global North as the longtime and largest producer of greenhouse gases, the economic model that pushes infrastructure into vulnerable river valleys, and the countries of High Asia that refuse to collaborate amid accelerating climate breakdown. The Himalaya is a young, unstable mountain chain; its geological and recorded history is replete with mass wasting and slope failure events in which vast amounts of rock and debris slide or crash downward. However, climate scientists are clear that human-induced global warming, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and allowed to accelerate recklessly over the 21st century, is responsible for the successive and escalating tragedies across our mountains.

Combined emissions

Nepal, the world’s 52nd largest country by population, produces no more than 0.03 to 0.05 per-cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The combined emissions contribution of the entire Hindu Kush-Himalaya system is also miniscule. As the earth overheats, nature and society will be impacted not just in the upper reaches of these mountains but also downstream along all the major rivers that emanate from here – the Indus, Yangtse, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Ganga.

Southasia’s governments have collectively been unable to adjust national and regional policies in response to the galloping climate emergency. Our political custodians have been too engrossed in nurturing internal rivalries and cross-border enmities to unite and effectively represent on the world stage the interests of the fourth of the world’s population that calls this region home.

Southasia would have the clout to impact global discourse if it could speak in one voice. We need to do this because we will be the worst-hit victims of a climate turned on its head, with the northern half of the Subcontinent already the poverty trough of the world. We have summer heat hitting 50 degree Celsius in the Indus-Ganga basin, breakdown of snow cover in the Himalaya and sea levels rising along Southasia’s substantial coastlines.

Langtang Lirung’s slippage of rock and ice, which sent flood waters raging through the districts of Rasuwa and Nuwakot and further downstream and which has taken the lives of Nepalis, Chinese, including Tibetans, as well as visitors from India and a host of overseas countries, is one more red alert in our climate-altered age. From the upper reaches of the Teesta, Bhagirathi, Gilgit, Bhotekoshi and other rivers, we will surely receive more warnings. For its part, the Lhende Khola, eastern tributary of the Bhotekoshi, had sent down a devastating supra-glacial lake outburst flood on 8 July 2025 as a prelude to the colossal tragedy of 26 August.

Even as rescue – of agriculturalists, householders, schoolchildren, infants, pilgrims, hydropower workers and engineers, truckers, customs agents, security personnel and many others – gives way to rehabilitation, Nepal will have to reckon with the tens of thousands of lives destroyed in the Rasuwa flood. Then will come the evaluation of the full toll from the loss of infrastructure on a national economy already in massive distress.

Wiped out

A dozen hydropower stations, including ones already in operation and others still under construction, with cumulative capacity of more than 670 megawatts and costing hundreds of millions of dollars, were wiped out. There will be a direct impact on banking and insurance, with hydropower being the most attractive sector for investment in a country largely devoid of entrepreneurship. The true scale of the destruction of schools, government buildings, transmission lines, highways and bridges will take time to calculate, keeping in mind that Kathmandu has yet to take full stock even of the country-wide anarchy of 9 September 2025, which caused enormous damage to both public and private property.

Hundreds of imported electric vehicles awaiting customs clearance as well as trucks laden with goods headed for Nepali markets before the upcoming Dasain festival season were washed away at the Rasuwagadhi border point. The hospitality industry, after repeated struggles to recover from the damage of the Maoist conflict, the 2015 earthquake, the Covid years and the mayhem of September 2025, has been wounded again just as the crucial autumn tourism season was gearing up. In response, the Nepal Tourism Board has come up with a poignant message to travelers: “Your visit matters.”

Nepal’s mountain villages were traditionally built at some height, with river-valley floors left for rice paddies where space allowed. But the development model of recent decades has promoted the highways along so-called “river corridors”, leading to ribbon development of human settlement. The two rivers named Bhotekoshi – one to the northeast of the Kathmandu Valley, the other to the northwest – historically linked the Valley to Tibet. More recently, the development of these corridors was made part of the national security strategy, particularly in terms of trade connectivity to China. This became especially so after the 2015 economic blockade from the south, which caused a severe shortage of food, fuel and medicines for several months and prompted Nepal to strengthen its northward commercial links. The route along the northeastern Bhotekoshi was damaged and weakened by the 2015 earthquake. Now the route along the sibling Bhotekoshi, which had become the primary overland trade route to China, is severed.

There will have to be fresh stock-taking, and questioning of the capital-centric development model that favours highways, hydropower and settlements along rivers that we know have a propensity for periodic rage. Nepal has predicated its national future on hydroelectricity, but what if the Rasuwa apocalypse is a harbinger of more and even bigger disasters along Himalayan rivers?

Kathmandu’s polity as well as successive Nepali governments have tended to “digest” calamities soon after they occur, and there is a surge of worry about the ability of the government under Balendra Shah, elected this March, to manage relief, recovery and future planning. In the immediate aftermath of the flood, elected local officials and experienced bureaucrats have been sidelined in the rescue and relief effort, with the Nepal Army given carte blanche to manage disaster response.

Shah’s government was born out of the chaos following the Gen Z protests of last September, which swept out Nepal’s old generation of political leaders. The young and powerful ministerial advisors who today largely manage the government in the place of bureaucrats, in the initial days after the Bhotekoshi disaster, seemed to prefer drone-mapping and helicopter sorties to ground-level outreach. Amid the social-media savvy of Nepal’s young new rulers, state and society are asked to come together to find a path through the fog of calamity, charting a course towards a future that is beginning to look very different from what we had planned for.

Building infrastructure

THE HIMALAYA is warming quicker than other, lower, regions, with the snow and ice melting fast. This “third pole” is both densely populated and on a steep incline from plain to high ridgeline, veritably a barometer or gauge of climate change. This is because, unlike in the Arctic and Antarctic, here there are millions of people living in the vulnerable zone from plain to highland, and the uncertainty and tragedy they face showcase the reality of the climate emergency. Locals can tell you of mosquitoes invading higher altitudes as temperatures warm, bringing along dengue and other diseases; of flora and fauna moving upward; and of rain now falling in places it used to snow.

Global warming hurts Southasia more than other places simply because of the numbers who will be affected by the rising oceans, receding glaciers, debris flows, heat waves, depleted groundwater, floods, ice-rock avalanches, landslides, cloudbursts and all kinds of other extreme weather events. When it comes to building infrastructure, many of these specific phenomena and their consequences are not taught in the engineering courses and protocols developed in Europe and North America and applied to the Subcontinent – an example being the silt and debris load carried by Himalayan rivers, which is far greater than the rivers on which dam and reservoir technology was developed.

Sadly, our ability to raise the climate alarm has been compromised by the geopolitical divisions across borders, cutting both east to west and north to south. Southasia’s national leaders and institutions do not speak up for the populations they represent, nor for the Global South as a whole, in confronting the Global North for spewing greenhouse emissions. Given the governmental vanity, especially of the two larger states – India and Pakistan – Southasia has not developed a common platform on climate change, which should not have been difficult as this is not an oil-exporting region.

Weaknesses in scholarship and statecraft mean that the societies of Southasia, locked within nation-states snarling at each other, are themselves at risk even as they fail to caution the rest of the world of the warming earth. China, with Tibet very much part of High Asia, has been kept at arms length, and for its part seems to prefer to keep the distance.

Generate urgency

Nepal, spanning the middle stretch of the 2500-kilometre Himalayan chain, has not been able to bring together its recalcitrant neighbours to discuss the transforming climate, crumbling mountains and depleting groundwater. The inability of successive governments in Kathmandu to convince New Delhi on the need to revive the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) points to both diffidence and irresponsibility. Nepal has been the chair of SAARC since 2014 and the organisation is headquartered in Kathmandu. If SAARC were active, this is where the climate crisis would be discussed among Southasia’s political leadership, the ministers and prime ministers.

Nepal’s politicians, administrators and citizen activists should be able to generate urgency by speaking of science and lived experience, but they have largely limited themselves to rote repetition of the received climate change verbiage. “Loss and damage”, “mitigation”, “adaptation” and “resilience” are terms that have lost the urgency of what they represent. While struggling to give these terms back their meaning, even as it rises from the Rasuwa flood, Nepal might consider raising Subcontinental consciousness on two urgent themes: the Southasian “brown cloud” and the loss of permafrost.

The generation of smoke, soot and dust from post-harvest stubble-burning, coal-fired power plants and smokestack industries, vehicular emissions and construction in the northwest of Southasia – especially the two Punjabs, Haryana, Delhi and its surroundings, and western Uttar Pradesh – is extracting a price across the Indus-Ganga plain and beyond. Unlike generic global warming, this is a problem of Southasia’s own making. Other than during the monsoon months, this historically unprecedented haze wafts eastward over and across the Himalaya. How it is hurting agriculture, flora, fauna and human health has not been studied enough, even though the obliteration of Himalayan vistas from Mussoorie, Nagarkot, Gangtok and elsewhere for much of the year is evidence enough of the brown cloud. Beyond matters of aesthetics and tourism, there is the question of what happens when the soot settles on the snows. This, sadly, is a subject of general ignorance.

The soot, or black carbon, is now a major cause of the retreat of glaciers and the loss of snow cover and ice slopes, exposing the rock underneath. This happens through what is known as the albedo effect: whereas the white surface of snow and ice reflects back much of the sun’s heat, the veneer of soot serves to absorb it, leading to accelerated melting. The result is not simply the retreat of the cryosphere of snow and ice so vital for our rivers, but also reduced overall replenishment of groundwater that hurts winter-time flow required in the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra plains.

All concerned, from grizzled policy planners to modern-day influencers, must internalise the fact that both global warming and brown cloud represent the human ability to irrevocably destroy nature’s ability to maintain equilibrium. The retreat of Himalayan snow and ice, whether through greenhouse gases or Subcontinental soot, results in disasters that are both incremental and catastrophic. It is no surprise that the concept of pralaya, referring to cosmic annihilation, has been used repeatedly by Nepal’s engineers and politicians alike to describe the Rasuwa disaster.

Weakening the protectors

THE MARKET ECONOMY, as it has evolved, demands concentration of populations. As Nepal’s rural economy monetised over the past three decades, subsistence villagers of the midhills and highlands migrated en masse to settle along the roads and highways constructed along the rivers’ side. What are known as run-of-river hydroelectric stations also came up along these same sections, to take advantage of the mountain inclines with rushing monsoon water and snowmelt. Given that infrastructure and habitations are now vulnerable to floods and debris flows in a manner not seen in human history, it becomes important to discuss Himalayan permafrost and the effects of its loss – a matter that was limited to academic papers but receiving attention in the days since the Rasuwa disaster.

Rising from the primordial Tethys Sea, for 50 million years the Himalaya has been pushing upwards as a section of the Gondwana tectonic plate burrows into the Eurasian landmass. There is a limit to the mountains’ rise against the pull of gravity, however, and their flanks keep crumbling amidst slope failures and earthquakes. Over millennia, billions of tons of rock and debris have accumulated beneath the peaks and ridgelines, locked in place at higher altitudes by frozen water. Until now.

Humans continue to look at Himalayan massifs as immovable sentinels and protectors, but we have weakened them. Historically, there have been calamitous mountain collapses, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and debris flows burying entire valleys and settlements. The innumerable riverside platforms across the Himalaya called tars were created by such mass wasting events and associated flow of debris. The Pokhara Valley, home to Nepal’s largest urban agglomeration outside the Kathmandu Valley, is the result of one such cataclysmic event circa 1190 CE, when the Annapurna IV massif collapsed and released 23 cubic kilometres of detritus that spread like fluid over the hills and gorges beneath.

The spate of debris flows, mountain collapses and GLOFs in the Himalaya in recent decades indicates that the climate crisis is real enough and is impacting the mountains, including through thawing of permafrost. Even accounting for the fact that there is much more reporting of disasters in the modern era than before, scientific study points beyond doubt to increased incidence.

We have been lulled into thinking that permafrost loss is a problem of the tundra, where the loosening earth is serving up preserved bodies of prehistoric mammals and the peat deposits release methane into the atmosphere. Permafrost in the Himalaya and other mountain ranges, on the other hand, binds rocks, sand and dust, helping keep the ridgelines and slopes standing and stable. The thawing of this permafrost is very real and probably linked to the recent Himalayan disasters: from the Bhotekoshi debris flows in 2026 and 2025 to Dharali in 2025, Thame in 2024, the Teesta in 2023, Chamoli and Melamchi in 2021, and Kedarnath in 2013.

A natural collapse?

What happened on Langtang Lirung was a rock-face collapse that also took down a section of glacier above it, all of which cascaded to cause the tragedy on the Bhotekoshi, known as Trishuli further downstream and Narayani or Gandaki further on. Was this a natural collapse of a mountainside in the course of geological time or did melting induced by global warming as well as the brown cloud play a role? Study of highland ambient temperatures, statistical probability, as well as the rush of calamitous events in recent years, points to the latter.

“While rockfalls, ice avalanches and GLOFs have occurred throughout geological history, modern anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions have fundamentally altered the temporal and spatial baselines of these events,” Ajaya Dixit, a Kathmandu-based engineer and water expert who has spent decades studying changing relationship between mountain rivers and people, says.  “The climatic shift may not directly cause any single, isolated slope failure, but rising temperatures systematically create the hazardous preconditions for mountain collapse.”

In an interview with the Nepali Times, Benjamin Horton, the dean of the School of Energy and the Environment of the City University of Hong Kong, said, “The (Rasuwa) tragedy did not occur in a healthy and stable mountain system… The Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average, glaciers are retreating, permafrost is degrading, and high-mountain slopes are becoming less stable… Nepal has lost close to one-third of its glacier ice in just over 30 years… We already know that burning fossil fuels is warming and destabilising the environment in which it occurred…we do not need uncertainty reduced to zero before acting. If anything, uncertainty about exactly where and when the next collapse will occur is an additional reason for urgency.”

Permafrost loss is part and parcel of global warming, while the brown cloud has exacerbated and accelerated permafrost thaw. The mountains and their peoples, as inanimate and animate gauges of global warming, can tell the story, but it is for the political leadership, scientific community and civil society to pay heed. Some imagination is required to connect the burning stubble and belching smokestacks of the northwestern plains with receding glaciers and the collapse of mountains. No imagination is required to understand that, just as the permafrost is thawing in Siberia and Alaska due to warming Earth, so is Himalayan permafrost weakening.

Ultimately, it is the global political forums that have to agree on recrafting the climate discourse, and there is no hiding the fact that the present state of geopolitics is inimical to achieving equitable and just results from climate negotiations. This is where the countries of Southasia must use their cumulative clout to force the world to listen. Our policy-makers have to come together to study the Nepal disaster as a regional turning point, to reimagine development strategies and to collaborate to overcome the global ennui in climate discourse.

The reality of anthropogenic climate transformation might be hard to grasp for some, and organising against it will be harder still. Do the impacted countries of the High Himalaya have the imagination to huddle amid the appalling ultra-nationalist animus? Beijing, Kathmandu, Delhi and Islamabad act like they harbour a collective trans-Himalayan death wish.

High up on mountains, there are puddles where there used to be snowdrifts. Climbers report flowing water above the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Everest. Villagers below Lamjung Himal will tell you how much lower the glacier snout was less than a decade ago. On the south side of Langtang Lirung, what the Swiss geologist Toni Hagen photographed as a wide glacier coming down to Kyanjing Gumba on the valley floor is today a hanging glacier far up the mountainside. It is foolhardy to think that global warming, permafrost loss and black carbon did not play a role in the Rasuwa disaster.

Nepal, sitting in the middle of the Himalayan chain and straddling the Tibetan plateau and Indus-Ganga plain, must rebound from the Rasuwa tragedy to try to unite recalcitrant neighbours to address the climate emergency. It should have the confidence of a country that has shown the way in community forestry, biogas, local government, wildlife conservation inclusive governance, and transitioning to electric vehicle use.

Because the Himalaya constitutes but a portion of the landmass of China, India and Pakistan, their national leaderships may well get distracted with other issues at hand. It is up to Nepal as the country with the most immediate understanding to try and shake the others into collaboration. It may be too little too late for those of the Bhotekoshi basin, but it is time to try for the rest of the planet.

Kanak Mani Dixit is a journalist, writer, translator, civil rights and democracy activist, and an advisor to Global Southasia. He is the chair of the Southasia Institute for History and Philosophy. This article was first published as ‘Nepal’s Rasuwa flood disaster is an alert to Southasia and the world‘ in Himal Southasian magazine, which he founded in 1997, and on his website, published:September 07, 2026.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.

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