Where annual rain falls in just four months, these master engineers funnel rooftop rainwater through handmade bamboo piping into gravel pits to recharge underground wells, maintaining them at the annual festivals. They adapt to the climate by unearthing ancient subterranean medieval stone spout networks for drinking, washing, and bathing.
“Recent flooding in Nepal was a pralaya,” says hydrometeorologist and environmental scientist Ngamindra Dahal, chairperson of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF) and executive board member of the South Asian Meteorological Association. “We’ve never witnessed anything like it.”
The Himalayas are losing glacier mass 65% faster than a decade ago. The impacts will be felt by 2 billion Asians across 12 major downstream river basins by 2050. And by 2100, it’s projected that 80% of glacier mass will be lost. The reality of dangerous cloudburst floods and water scarcity is, however, already being felt.
The vulnerable, historically low-polluting country has been waiting for a response to its request for compensation from high-emitting nations for the damage created in part by this climate disaster. And on Oct. 22, Nepal became the first country approved for a provisional payout from the U.N.’s Loss and Damage Fund, securing over $21.6 million for recovery from the catastrophic floods. Meanwhile, with deepening uncertainty about the planet’s most basic natural resource, Himalayan people forge on charting their own solutions to save their homes by reviving ancient water systems, building artificial glaciers, and uncovering hidden flood risks.
For centuries, perennial springs, or mool, have dictated how Himalayan communities live their lives. But that trusted relationship is breaking down. Still, resilient Nepali communities are adapting to the shifting environment of melting snow and ice and unpredictable monsoon rain by reclaiming historic infrastructure.
Through the NWCF and an intergovernmental organization protecting mountain environments and cultures called the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, Dahal is replenishing water supplies by taking inventory of more recent drying springs to gauge a new baseline of water availability.
He’s teaching local communities how to revive and reroute their drying life sources based on changing water movement underground, by tracking seasonal flow rates, water quality, and geographic elevations. Once new water patterns are mapped, Dahal helps communities design localized water-sharing agreements and storage, and adapt household rainwater harvesting systems—in a grass-roots water governance model aligned with the Nepal government adaptation plan. “When a pipe breaks, you repair the pipe; when a tank collapses, you rebuild the tank,” says Dahal. “But when the spring itself stops flowing, repairing the infrastructure solves nothing.”
Hidden Risk
An avalanche had struck her 1,000 year-old ancestral valley—just two years after a massive glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), a sudden violent release of water from a melting glacial lake—and had taken with hundreds of the yaks that were her nomadic herding family’s generational livelihood. This went against everything Limi Valley indigenous villagers had known about trusting the mountain Gods.
“I couldn’t let the community blame itself for something it was not responsible when I knew it was those emitting greenhouse gases who were partially to blame,” says Lhazom, one of the first from Limi Valley to earn a college degree and now an activist among a wave of Gen Zs fighting climate destruction in Nepal.
Instead, thawing permafrost—the ice that acts as glue to bind mountain rock—was without warning, draining trapped small “thermokarst” lakes, releasing massive volumes of underground water down the slope. As a result of their investigation, that 2025 Limi Valley flood was reclassified as Nepal’s first-ever recorded thermokarst lake flood.
It led to an acknowledgement and warning in a July 2026 scientific paper about the increased risk of thermokarst lake floods due to climate change—not just in the Himalayas, but across Peru, China, and other high-alpine mountain environments. And from it, a newly defined dangerous hazard category, called Small Alpine Lake Outbursts (SALOs), emerged.
But most importantly to Lhazom, she was able to convince her Indigenous people of the Limi Valley that the flooding was not their fault. Since finally putting them on the map, Lhazom has been working to help secure government funds to resettle the remaining families away from danger on nearby ancestral land.
“The frozen water banks we know are melting, and that means flooding that can sweep an entire village away within a fraction of a second. Our water sources are getting thinner and fewer and that is a grave concern,” says Lhazom. “But what’s most heartbreaking for these mountain people is knowing they can never go home.”
Growing Artificial Glaciers
Northwest of Lhazom’s home, in Ladakh, India, where –40°winds whip through a remote desert on an 11,500-ft. shelf in the shadow of the Himalaya’s highest northern peaks, the people rely on a single water source: melting glacial ice, now covered in soot from vehicles carrying adventure tourists acclimating in its capital of Leh.
But here in the “Third Pole,” climate activist and mechanical engineer Sonam Wangchuk is blending modern technology with his traditional knowledge. In 2015, inspired by stories of his ancestors moving “parent” glaciers into a cave to make “baby” glaciers—based on the early work of “the Iceman of India”—Wangchuk developed the science to revive the ancient cultural practice of grafting glaciers. He grew new ice to reverse water scarcity in Ladakh.
Word of Wangchuk’s ice storage traveled, and he built ice stupas in numerous Himalayan villages facing water scarcity, even allowing a community from Ladakh’s abandoned village of Kulum to return home.
“We innovated a method to either spray water from fountains or drain the pipes using valves controlled by weather and pipeline sensors,” says Balasubramania, who in 2023 independently launched Acres of Ice to scale the ice stupas.
But the fight may never be over for Wangchuk, who knows the temporary nature of his adaptation strategy won’t outlive the glaciers. He is now testing a new application: sourcing water for his stupa from a dangerous glacial lake to help prevent it from collapsing and sending a massive GLOF wave down the mountain—and using natural refrigeration to refreeze the lakes.
“There’s very little that can be done at this point to protect against glaciers in vulnerable places in the Himalayas, so these communities suffer and pay the price for what the rest of the world does,” says Wangchuk. “The recent avalanche in Nepal is an alarm bell for the rest of the world to mend our ways on this planet.”
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