The horror, the horror. On 26 August, catastrophic flash floods devastated settlements and communities around Rasuwa, close to Nepal’s border with Tibet, high in the Himalayas. The nightmarish scenes, captured by CCTV cameras and witnessed across the globe, showed thousands of tonnes of ice, water, mud and debris surging with fearsome intensity through the Bhotekoshi, Trishuli and Narayani river systems.
Reports and analyses to date indicate that a mass of glacier and rock, about 600 metres wide, fell more than a kilometre into the Lhende river valley, blocking the river and creating a natural dam. When the blockage gave way, the resulting chain reaction left hundreds of people dead, thousands missing and more than 90 000 in urgent need of assistance.
We watched with awe and dread as that irresistible force ploughed through communities, destroying livelihoods and devastating infrastructure. The lives of a generation of people in the region were irrevocably changed.
The questions now being asked are: What caused this disaster, could it have been prevented, and could more lives have been saved?
The most frequently cited culprit is climate change, and with good reason. In 2024, the global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time over an entire calendar year. This did not constitute a formal breach of the Paris Agreement threshold, which refers to warming sustained over a much longer period. However, it was a deeply troubling warning. We will return to this point.
According to Prof. Christo Coetzee, a disaster risk reduction and complex adaptive systems expert from the North-West University’s (NWU) School of Geo- and Spatial Sciences, who warns that no easy conclusions can yet be drawn.
“You already see many people attributing it to climate change, although I think it is too early to ascribe it solely to that. When events like this occur, they are likely caused by multiple factors that we need to understand if we are to prevent similar disasters in future,” he said.
“As much as climate change may have played a role, disasters can often also be traced back to governance failures. In this case, the disaster occurred along the border between China and Nepal, which may have created uncertainty over who was responsible for monitoring and managing the developing risk.
“The reality is that the conditions leading to this disaster must have developed over time, even though the event we witnessed unfolded suddenly. With two countries involved, each may have assumed that the other was managing the situation, with the result that no one took full responsibility.
“This is why we cannot look at climate change alone. We must also consider the apparent lack of effective monitoring and early-warning systems, which may themselves represent failures of governance.”
Now we are getting closer to the real issue.
Writing in The Conversation, Dibyesh Anand, professor of international relations and deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Westminster, argues that, despite Nepal’s warm relations with Beijing and firm adherence to the “One China” principle, China’s tight control over Tibet complicates cooperation along their shared border.
Tibet is a militarised frontier. Access is restricted, independent scrutiny is limited and information is tightly controlled. It remains an information black hole.
This extends to the glacial and hydrological data that could help Nepal anticipate floods originating on the Tibetan plateau. Anand notes that Nepal has no mechanism for receiving real-time data on Chinese glacial lakes and rivers, while Nepalese officials have accused Beijing of withholding crucial information.
Most tellingly, he writes:
“When a disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region demands that rescuers cross quickly or that a warning travel downstream from an upstream lake, it runs into a system built for control rather than speed. Growing evidence suggests the recent glacier collapse happened on the Nepalese side of the border, near the Langtang Lirung peak. But wherever the flood began, no warning reached the people in its path.”
Authoritarian control without sufficient regard for its consequences is becoming a feature of the changing geopolitical landscape. Isolationism and strategic suspicion increasingly impede the international cooperation needed to confront disasters that recognise neither borders nor political ideologies. Those living along the fault lines between competing states are left to suffer the consequences.
There is something both farcical and damning about it, reminiscent of the most parodied scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. Yet there is nothing amusing about the outcome.
This brings us back to climate change.
Writing in Natural Hazards Research, lead author Md Mujahidul Islam and his colleagues identify the same fundamental failure. Their 2025 review finds that an early-warning system is only as strong as its weakest link: detection means little if an actionable warning never reaches those in danger.
They identify remote and marginalised communities as particularly exposed where internet, radio and cellular coverage is weak. The answer is not technology alone, but people-centred, community-based systems using local knowledge, trusted volunteers, local languages and multiple communication channels.
A warning that does not reach the last village is no warning at all.
As was the case in Nepal.
Where do we go from here? Climate change may not have acted alone, but it is steadily loading the dice in favour of more dangerous extremes. Warming glaciers, thawing permafrost and increasingly unstable mountain slopes are creating risks that extend far beyond the places where they originate.
In 2021, in an incident similar to the one in Nepal, a mass of rock and glacier ice collapsed in Uttarakhand, India, creating a debris flood that killed more than 200 people. In 2023, South Lhonak Lake in Sikkim, India, burst. Many lives were lost, while an early-warning system that should have been installed in 2022 remained incomplete. These are not isolated incidents.
The reality is that disasters do not stop at border posts. Catastrophes do not wait for bureaucratic approval. Yes, climate change can intensify a hazard, but human intervention, or the lack thereof, helps determine whether lives are lost or livelihoods are saved.
We may not be able to prevent every glacier from collapsing, but we have the tools to shield the most vulnerable from the full force of nature’s wrath.
In Nepal, nature unleashed the flood. Human systems failed to outrun it.
The horror, the horror.
Prof. Christo Coetzee
