On 26 August, a catastrophic flash flood tore through valleys in Nepal and Tibet, destroying homes, markets, bridges, roads, and hydropower infrastructure along the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers. Hundreds of people were killed, and many more remain missing. The devastation came with terrifying speed, leaving little time for residents and tourists to react, according to Sunil Acharya, an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu.
Decades of Warnings Ignored
Acharya, writing in a personal capacity, expressed anger at the destruction, noting it follows years of warnings from scientists and civil society that a rapidly warming planet would make disasters more frequent, more intense, and harder to predict. He argues that this is the cost of delaying global climate action.
The immediate questions, he says, rightly focus on what happened and whether people could have been warned. Nepal needs stronger early warning systems, better monitoring of glaciers and unstable slopes, cross-border communication between Nepal and Tibet, and greater investment in preparedness. However, Acharya contends that the flash floods expose something more fundamental: climate change is producing hazards that behave differently from those the systems were designed to detect.
Warning Systems Overwhelmed
The warning system in the high-mountain Bhotekoshi valley illustrates the problem. The sudden, debris-laden flood destroyed upstream hydrological stations before they could register a rising water level and trigger an alert. The system was designed to detect a more gradual rise in water levels, but this flood arrived as a massive surge of rock, mud, and water, destroying the very instruments meant to detect it.
Preliminary assessments indicate that a large glacial collapse triggered an ice-rock avalanche and debris flow, temporarily blocking the river before a massive surge travelled downstream. The precise sequence is still being investigated, but the event shows how quickly hazards can cascade in a warming mountain environment. By the time authorities received information and sent warnings downstream, communities closest to the source had virtually no time to respond.
Acharya stresses that this does not make early warning futile, but it means being honest about its limits. A warning is useful only if there is time to act. It cannot stop a mountain of ice and rock from collapsing, nor protect infrastructure in an increasingly hazardous corridor.
Adaptation Limits and Global Responsibility
Adaptation has limits, too. For years, Nepal and other vulnerable countries have been ramping up efforts to adapt by strengthening infrastructure and improving preparedness, often without financial support from countries that historically contributed most to the climate crisis. Nepal needs much greater international support for adaptation, including early warning, mountain monitoring, climate science, anticipatory action, resilient infrastructure, and disaster preparedness. Because Himalayan hazards originate beyond national borders, this must also include stronger cross-border cooperation and timely sharing of information.
The Nepal Himalaya is changing rapidly. Glaciers are retreating, and warming is altering the conditions in which glaciers, permafrost, and mountain slopes remain stable. The first task must be to stop making the crisis worse. Countries that benefited most from decades of fossil-fuel-driven growth have a particular responsibility to cut emissions rapidly. A just transition away from coal, oil, and gas towards renewable energy is a matter of global justice.
The fossil-fuel industry cannot be separated from this conversation. Companies have made enormous profits extracting and selling the fuels that have driven global heating, while communities on the climate frontline are being asked to prepare for increasingly destructive impacts with far fewer resources. Even rapid mitigation cannot undo the warming already baked into the climate system.
Loss and Damage Finance Obligation
The second task requires historical polluter states to pay for loss and damages. Nepal has contributed less than 0.1% of historical global greenhouse gas emissions, and its per-capita emissions remain among the lowest in the world. Yet the country is increasingly paying for a crisis it did almost nothing to create. The cost of such an event is not an abstract figure: it is the lives of people killed, hydropower stations that took years to build and disappeared in minutes, and public money that must now be spent on recovery instead of health and education.
Acharya argues that Nepal should not be forced to borrow to recover from disasters to which it contributed so little, nor should its scarce domestic resources be repeatedly diverted to repair damage caused by emissions of the global north. Loss and damage finance must be additional to official development assistance, adaptation and mitigation finance, accessible and predominantly grant-based. But it cannot substitute for mitigation. No amount of compensation will be enough if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the scale it does today.
The people living along the Bhotekoshi river did not choose a warming Himalaya, nor the fossil-fuel economy that drove most of the warming. With enough support, they can prepare better and build more resilient livelihoods, but they cannot adapt their way out of every disaster. Loss and damage finance is not charity – it is an obligation to people already paying the price.
