And we know something: the furious deluge that came crashing down from a mountain peak in northern Nepal, like a scene from an apocalyptic movie, and tore through the valleys of the Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts of our country was not a freak accident.
On Monday, Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority estimated that at least 1,050 people have died in the floods, 292 are injured and 3,916 are missing. More than 90,000 people have been affected. Around 600 of the missing people are foreign nationals from 39 countries.
Chinese monitors clocked just six to seven minutes between the collapse and the moment the surge hit Gyirong Port at the China-Nepal border. In Rasuwa district, officials recorded the Trishuli River rising as much as nine meters in 30 minutes.
Nepalis are resilient. Every time a disaster hits, we mourn our dead, rebuild, and carry on. We call it karma, or fate, or the mountains doing what mountains do. But this isn’t karma. The climate is changing, and human activity is changing it. Our resilience becomes a quiet abandonment, a way for the rest of the world to admire how well we absorb losses it helped create.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya is warming faster than the global average. Go up to the mountains and you can see it: bare grey rock where there was snow and ice just a decade ago. The region is often called the “Third Pole" because it holds the largest volume of ice outside the two poles. It is also one of the planet’s most important water towers, feeding ten major river systems and sustaining nearly two billion people downstream.
An assessment by the Nepal government and ICIMOD identified 21 glacial lakes across the Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali basins of the country as potentially dangerous and capable of producing a damaging outburst. In 2016, the government of Nepal and UNDP worked together to lower water levels in Imja Tsho, one of the largest and most closely watched glacial lakes in the Everest region. The initiative successfully drained Imja Tsho to a safer level and installed community-based early warning and response systems.
The arithmetic of climate injustice
And here is the arithmetic of the injustice: Nepal is one of the smallest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet its people, from remote villages to the Kathmandu Valley, keep paying the price for it. Nepal has grown its forest cover to nearly 46% of its land and draws around 90% of its electricity from clean hydropower. The climate disasters we face are the essence of climate injustice: those least responsible for the crisis are the first and worst affected, and too often the least equipped to recover.
Every major disaster forces the country to divert scarce resources away from education, healthcare, infrastructure and development and back into rebuilding what was lost. A country that spends its future paying for someone else’s emissions cannot develop. It can only tread water. Nepal doesn’t need another pledge recited at another international conference. We need the international community to move from symbolic gestures to real action.
And finally, the people who live in these mountains and the billions who depend on the water flowing from them deserve a voice in climate policy. Nepal should be central to that conversation. We are not debating what climate change might do. We are already living it.
Nepal’s mountains are our identity. They feed our rivers, our tourism, our sense of who we are. Now they are also ground zero for the climate emergency. The world needs to heed this warning: we need shared, urgent, and just action before more mountains give way.
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