- Rapidly shrinking glaciers and unstable mountain slopes in Nepal are increasing risks of floods, landslides, and devastating debris flows downstream.
- The Rasuwa disaster demonstrates that mountain hazards are interconnected, necessitating comprehensive monitoring of glaciers, lakes, and slopes.
- Nepal advocates for international climate finance and justice to address increasing environmental losses despite having minimal global carbon emissions.
- Strengthening disaster resilience requires integrating advanced warning technology with community preparedness and building infrastructure that accounts for upstream environmental changes.
Kathmandu: For generations, Nepal has looked to the Himalayas with pride. The mountains have provided water, supported farming and hydropower, attracted visitors from around the world and shaped the country’s identity.
But the mountains that have long appeared permanent and powerful are changing.
Glaciers are shrinking, new glacial lakes are forming and existing lakes are expanding. Mountain slopes are becoming increasingly unstable, while avalanches, landslides, floods and unpredictable weather are creating new challenges for communities living below the high peaks.
The devastating disaster in Rasuwa on August 26 has brought this changing reality painfully close to home.
The disaster was not simply a story about water rushing down a river. It was a reminder that a sudden event high in the mountains can turn into a tragedy many kilometres downstream, destroying homes, roads, bridges and livelihoods within minutes.
By August 29, at least 669 people had been reported dead in Nepal and seven in Tibet, while around 3,000 people were still missing. More than 3,700 people had been rescued. Behind those numbers, however, are families still waiting for news of loved ones, communities trying to understand what happened and survivors facing the difficult task of rebuilding their lives.
For many families, the disaster is not a statistic. It is an empty chair at home, a missing father, mother, son, daughter or friend.
The difficult geography of the Himalayas has made the rescue effort even harder. Roads and bridges have been damaged, communication links disrupted and mountain slopes remain unstable. In some places, people have had to wait for help while rescue teams struggle to reach them.
When the Glacier Becomes the Danger
Nepal has spent years preparing for glacial lake outburst floods, commonly known as GLOFs. And there is good reason for that concern.
But Rasuwa has reminded the country that the danger does not always begin with a lake.
Preliminary assessments indicate that the disaster was associated with the collapse of a large mass of glacier ice and rock, producing a powerful flow of water and debris downstream. Scientists are still examining the precise chain of events.
That uncertainty is important.
It would be too early to say that climate change directly caused the Rasuwa disaster. What can be said with greater confidence is that the Himalayan environment is changing rapidly, and those changes are affecting the conditions in which mountain hazards occur.
ICIMOD has reported that glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya lost ice at a rate 65 percent faster during 2011–2020 than during the previous decade.
That does not mean every flood, landslide or glacier collapse can automatically be blamed on climate change. Mountain disasters are often the result of several interacting geological, hydrological and climatic factors.
But the message is difficult to ignore: the environment in which Nepal's communities live is changing.
The Himalayas Are Connected
The experience of Thame in the Everest region last year provides another warning.
The August 2024 disaster was initially seen mainly as a glacial lake outburst flood. A later ICIMOD study found a much more complicated sequence. A large rock avalanche struck a glacial lake, creating a displacement wave that contributed to the lake’s breach. The resulting flood then affected another lake, increasing the destructive force of the event.
The combined event released about 459,000 cubic metres of water and debris and destroyed much of Thame settlement, displacing 135 people.
The lesson is simple but important.
A glacier cannot be considered separately from a lake. A lake cannot be considered separately from the mountain slope around it. And a river cannot be considered separately from everything happening upstream.
One event can trigger another.
That means Nepal's disaster planning must also change. Instead of asking only which glacial lakes are dangerous, authorities need to understand the condition of glaciers, slopes, rivers, snow and ice, and the possibility of natural dams forming and suddenly failing.
Nepal Has Reason to Worry About Glacial Lakes
Nepal is home to numerous glacial lakes, and some require close attention.
A joint assessment by ICIMOD and UNDP identified 3,624 glacial lakes across the Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali river basins in Nepal, Tibet and India. Of these, 47 were classified as potentially dangerous, including 21 in Nepal.
But these numbers need to be understood carefully.
The presence of 21 potentially dangerous glacial lakes does not mean that 21 lakes are about to burst. It means they have characteristics that warrant continued scientific monitoring and risk-reduction measures.
A glacial lake is not, by itself, a disaster.
The danger increases when a lake grows rapidly, when the natural dam holding it becomes unstable, or when an avalanche or landslide enters the lake and pushes a large amount of water outward.
Nepal's experience with Tsho Rolpa and other glacial lakes has shown that risk can be reduced when authorities act before disaster strikes. But it has also shown that mountain environments never remain exactly the same.
A Crisis That Reaches Beyond the Mountains
The climate crisis is not only a Himalayan story.
In Nepal's Chure and Madhesh regions, communities face different but equally serious challenges, including drought, extreme heat, forest fires, water shortages, flash floods and land degradation.
For farmers, climate change can create a painful contradiction. Too little water can damage crops, while too much rain arriving in a short period can wash away fields and homes.
This is why climate change has become much more than an environmental issue for Nepal.
It is increasingly connected to food security, water resources, public health, infrastructure, tourism, employment and the national economy.
Government figures cited in the source material show that Nepal recorded 32,375 disaster events between 2018 and 2024, causing 2,996 deaths and leaving 446 people missing. Direct economic losses were estimated at around NPR 23.6 billion.
Behind each number is a community trying to recover.
Nepal's Climate Justice Argument
This is where Nepal's call for climate justice becomes particularly important.
Nepal contributes only a very small share of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it faces serious consequences from a changing climate.
The country has repeatedly raised this concern internationally.
Former Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ highlighted Nepal's vulnerability at the United Nations General Assembly in 2023 and called for greater international climate finance and support for climate-related losses.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres later visited Nepal in October 2023, including the Himalayan region, and drew global attention to the changes taking place in the mountains.
Nepal's climate diplomacy, however, did not begin with those events.
In 2009, then-Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal held a Cabinet meeting at Kalapatthar to draw international attention to melting glaciers. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, then-Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba raised the issue of climate vulnerability and loss and damage. Former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli also highlighted melting glaciers, changing monsoon patterns, floods and landslides at the UN General Assembly in 2024.
The message from successive governments has been broadly consistent: Nepal is experiencing consequences of a global problem to which it has contributed very little.
Sympathy Is Not Enough
Every time Nepal suffers a major disaster, messages of sympathy arrive from around the world.
Those messages matter. But for a country repeatedly facing the consequences of climate and mountain hazards, sympathy alone cannot provide long-term protection.
Nepal needs access to climate finance, technology, scientific expertise and stronger mechanisms for addressing loss and damage.
There has already been international support.
In July 2025, the Green Climate Fund approved a US$36.1 million grant for a programme aimed at reducing the risk of glacial lake outburst floods in Nepal. The programme focuses on four lakes—Thulagi, Lower Barun, Lumding Tsho and Hongu-2—and is expected to benefit more than 2.2 million people.
Such support is important. But the Rasuwa disaster shows why Nepal's approach must go beyond monitoring individual lakes.
The country needs a broader system capable of watching the entire mountain environment.
Warnings Must Reach People
Modern technology can help Nepal see what is happening in the mountains.
Satellites, remote sensing, weather stations, river gauges, glacier monitoring and ground sensors can provide valuable information.
But technology is useful only if that information reaches people in time.
A warning means little to a family that does not know where to go. An evacuation plan is useless if the route to safety has already been destroyed.
That is why communities themselves must be part of disaster preparedness.
People living in vulnerable settlements should know their evacuation routes, identify safe areas and regularly practise emergency procedures. Local residents can also be trained in first aid, communication and basic search and rescue.
In remote mountain areas, local people are often the first people available to help.
Building Safely in a Changing Mountain Environment
Rasuwa also raises difficult questions about development.
Nepal needs roads. It needs bridges. It needs hydropower. It needs better connectivity for remote communities.
But infrastructure built in mountain valleys and along rivers must take into account the hazards that may come from far upstream.
A bridge that has survived ordinary floods for decades may not survive a massive debris flow. A hydropower project may be damaged by an event that begins many kilometres away.
The answer is not to stop development.
The answer is to make development safer.
Risk assessments should consider not only past disasters but also changing environmental conditions and the possibility of extreme events that have not occurred frequently in historical records.
The latest disaster is a reminder that rebuilding should not simply mean putting back what was destroyed in exactly the same way.
Where necessary, reconstruction should create stronger infrastructure and move particularly vulnerable facilities to safer locations.
The Himalayas Need Cooperation
There is another reality Nepal cannot ignore: the Himalayas do not stop at national borders.
Rivers flow from the high mountains into downstream communities. A change in a glacier or lake on one side of the border can affect people on the other.
Nepal and China therefore have a shared interest in exchanging scientific information, monitoring dangerous areas and improving emergency communication.
This should be understood primarily as a matter of human safety.
Floods do not carry passports. Landslides do not recognize borders. Neither do avalanches or debris flows.
Better cooperation could give communities more time to prepare when dangerous conditions develop.
A Stronger Case for Climate Justice
Nepal's case for climate justice is strongest when it combines moral argument with scientific evidence.
The country should continue to point to its low contribution to global emissions, but it should also document the real costs of climate-related disasters, strengthen scientific research and demonstrate where international assistance can make the greatest difference.
At the same time, Nepal should avoid presenting every disaster as proof of climate change.
That would weaken rather than strengthen its case.
A more credible argument is that the Himalayan environment is changing rapidly, that these changes are creating new and potentially more complex risks, and that Nepal lacks the financial and technological resources to manage all of those risks alone.
That is a case the international community should take seriously.
A Moment for Nepal to Rethink Its Approach
The Rasuwa tragedy should not be remembered only as another disaster from which Nepal must recover.
It should also become a moment for the country to rethink how it understands Himalayan risk.
The lesson is not simply that Nepal has potentially dangerous glacial lakes. Nor is it simply that glaciers are melting.
The deeper lesson is that the Himalayan system is changing—and the hazards are connected.
A glacier can collapse. A rock avalanche can trigger a flood. A flood can destroy a bridge. A destroyed bridge can isolate a village. An isolated village can wait longer for rescue.
A disaster that begins high in the mountains can therefore become a national humanitarian and economic crisis within hours.
Nepal cannot stop every glacier from retreating. It cannot prevent every avalanche or predict every disaster.
But it can become better prepared.
It can invest in science and early-warning systems. It can build safer infrastructure. It can strengthen local communities. It can improve coordination among government agencies. It can cooperate with neighbouring countries.
And internationally, it can continue to argue for a fairer response to the climate crisis.
For the families affected by Rasuwa, however, these long-term discussions offer little comfort today. They are still waiting for missing relatives, mourning those they have lost and wondering how they will rebuild.
That human reality should remain at the heart of Nepal's climate debate.
The mountains may be changing, but Nepal still has an opportunity to change the way it prepares for them.
Climate justice, in the end, is not only about glaciers, carbon emissions or international negotiations. It is about whether a family living below the Himalayas has a fair chance to survive—and rebuild—when the mountains change.
