Five days after the flood that struck the Rasuwa and Nuwakot regions of Nepal, the number of missing people is growing. The whereabouts of more than 4,700 people are unknown, while local authorities are struggling to cope with the shocking number of recovered bodies. This disaster hit home for me.
My husband’s village was wiped out, his relatives narrowly escaping the flood. For more than seven years, I have worked in climate advocacy. I have sat in policy meetings, written reports on glacial risk and spoken at panels about the particular vulnerability of Himalayan communities.
I thought I understood what was at stake. The horror and despair I have seen in affected communities are hard to describe. What is worse is that the threat is far from over.
Preliminary scientific evidence indicates that a massive ice-and-rock collapse in the high Himalayas triggered a cascading event in the Lhende Khola, sending a sudden surge of water, rock and sediment into the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli river system. As a result of this movement, a lake has formed near the Nepal-Tibet border and may yet cause a second flood. While Nepal could not realistically have prevented the initial collapse, the scale of the disaster highlights glaring gaps in disaster risk reduction and preparedness under a changed climate reality.
The country urgently needs real, funded investment in early-warning systems for glacial and flood hazards in high-risk mountain corridors. Right now, authorities must urgently map and monitor unstable glaciers, landslide-dammed lakes and river corridors, while restoring damaged sensors and establishing 24/7 real-time communication among mountain monitoring stations and downstream communities. We need much stronger upstream hazard monitoring and river-corridor planning, including transboundary data-sharing with China, risk-sensitive infrastructure planning and continuous assessment of unstable glaciers, slopes and temporary debris dams.
Clear evacuation triggers, emergency shelters and multiple warning channels, including SMS alerts, sirens and local radio, must be activated immediately to give people enough time to move to safety as the threat of secondary flooding escalates. Here in the Himalayas, the warming of the region is destabilising our cryosphere: our glaciers, our glacial lakes and our mountain slopes. With each year of record heat that passes, the risk of exactly this kind of catastrophe rises.
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