Bengaluru: Brown debris-ridden, unstoppable waves lashed the banks of Nepal’s Bhotekoshi river on August 26. It left behind a wide, empty grey trail, as mud settled over all the things it had swept away: homes, schools, buildings, dams. Twelve days later, nearly 1,350 people are dead. Almost 5,000 are still missing. The trigger, based on later satellite and photographic evidence, was an ice-rock avalanche high up in Rasuwa district on the Nepal-China border: a portion of a mountain had collapsed, falling thousands of feet. The impact shook the earth: scientists recorded an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Though the role of climate change in this incident is still being debated, the science is clear: signs of climate change have been showing up across the Himalaya, from shrinking glaciers to thawing permafrost. Scientists and activists have also flagged the need for better development models across the range, as well as the importance of sharing data not only between countries but also research teams, agencies and departments within India too. With Nepal losing US $ 2.56 billion worth of property, housing and infrastructure, rebuilding is the priority now – a feature that all countries have to grapple with once disasters like these strike. This is where climate funds have to come in, experts say.Role of climate change?While scientists initially thought that a 4.4 magnitude earthquake in Rasuwa district on the Nepal-China border triggered the floods downstream in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers, the US Geological Survey later said that the earthquake (a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter Scale) was in fact triggered by a glacier collapse at the Lantang Lirung (a peak in Nepal on the China border). A few days later as more satellite data emerged, it became apparent that an ice-rock avalanche had occurred. Bedrock failure had caused a part of the mountain to collapse and it fell thousands of feet below, say scientists. It pulverised ice, and collected debris and momentum as it rushed downstream. Did melting glaciers caused by climate change trigger the slope failure or ice-rock avalanche? It’s hard to pinpoint climate change as the prime reason for this incident, a geospatial scientist recently told The Wire. Others, like Farooq Azam, senior cryosphere specialist and intervention manager at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) say that it could have been a combination of climate and geological factors at play.“This is one of the biggest disasters in Nepalese history…Glaciers are receding and exposing rock surfaces underneath which absorb heat because their albedo is less and when the glaciers are receding there is always some loose bore and debris left behind. So, it seems like a combination of both climate treatment as well as the geologic process,” he said, commenting on the incident on September 4 in an online discussion.The science is clear: climate change is already at work across the Himalaya. India is feeling the pinch too. Permafrost is thawing. This is a layer of soil or rock that remains at or below 0°C for at least two consecutive years, and traps vast amounts of carbon. A study published in Scientific Reports in 2025 that investigated the first case of permafrost-degraded subsidence in Lindur village in Lahaul and Spiti district in Himachal Pradesh found significant land subsidence rates ranging from 7.9 to−6.8 cm per year. Data from 1950 to 2024 from the area showed a rise in temperature at a rate of 0.02°C/year and a shift in the precipitation pattern over the village. Local geology and existing rock glaciers exacerbated the rate of subsidence leading to the development of cracks in the region, the study noted.Glaciers are shrinking. Satellite images of 77 glaciers in the Drass basin in Ladakh from 2000 to 2020 show that the total glacier cover here has shrunk by 5.31 ± 0.33 km2. As glaciers retreat in the Himalaya, the number and size of glacial lakes have increased. According to the ISRO, of the 2,431 lakes larger than 10 hectares identified during 2016-17 covering the catchments of Indian Himalayan river basins across the mountain range, 676 glacial lakes have “notably expanded” since 1984. India is home to 130 of these lakes. Of the 676 glacial lakes, 601 have expanded more than twice their original areas. Expanding glacial lakes are vulnerable to Glacial Lake Outburst Floods like the one that occurred in South Lhonak lake in Sikkim in 2023. With climate change and its impacts, the Nepal floods are a warning that all countries across the mountain range including India have to have crucial checks and balances in place as these landscapes change drastically due to human activity, experts say.Questioning development modelsAccording to Manshi Asher, co-founder of the Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective in Himachal Pradesh, there is an urgent need to look at the fragility of the current development model being implemented across Indian states in the Himalaya. The modern infrastructure that we are pushing forward aims for efficiency, speed and linearity, she said. For instance, the purpose of a fourlane is to reduce time of travel for which the curves typical of mountain terrains are seen as a problem.“To get rid of the curves, you need to either dig into the mountain or do surface excavation. And in both cases, the kind of muck generation, kind of debris and sediment that comes out, the kind of erosion that takes place, the deforestation that takes place, the geological instability…the muck is chucked on slopes, or thrown into the rivers and then when the river is in spate it will lead to a flash flood downstream. So there is this cycle of destruction that is repeated because we are going into rebuilding the same thing again and again,” she told The Wire.Such a model of development is based on externalising the cost to people, to the ecology and to the larger public exchequer, one that runs into billions, she added.Rescue workers at the site of the immigration building which was wiped by Aug 26 flash flood, Gyrong county at Tibet Nepal border. Photo: PTI via handout.“Nepal has gone into debt, Himachal is in a major fiscal deficit and disasters have contributed greatly towards it. So there is a need to talk about the fragility of our economic system that is leading to this because it is the primary driver. It is the ease of doing business that has led to a kind of sidelining of existing data whether it is data on Himalayan science, climate, science that is developing and the interaction of all three.” The People for Himalaya, a collective of civil society groups, environmental organisations and activists, has also listed the rapid transformation that the landscape is undergoing in the name of development as a major concern.“Over recent decades the Himalaya has become a major frontier for hydropower, tourism, roads, tunnels, urban expansion and other infrastructure,” it said in a public statement released on September 7. “These interventions may have brought short-term economic opportunities to the region but they have simultaneously irreversibly altered rivers, slopes, floodplains, forests and settlements. They have reshaped where people live, how water flows, how slopes behave and where infrastructure is exposed. Disaster risk is therefore produced through an interaction between geological and climatic processes and the developmental policies and projects that have multiplied the risk manifold in these landscapes.”Nearly 80 organisations including SECMOL (Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh founded by Sonam Wangchuk) and 115 individuals including Ravi Chopra (who chaired a Supreme Court-appointed committee to examine the impacts of the Char Dham Pariyojana, a controversial highway widening project in Uttarakhand that experts had flagged for its adverse environmental impacts) have endorsed the statement.Diluted laws, greenwashingThe problems that the landscape is witnessing also has to do with the way we are governing this region which is being looked at as a strategic frontier where infrastructure development is driven because of securitisation, Asher said, citing the example of the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act. Cleared by the parliament in 2023, the Act states that strategic projects within 100 km of border areas will be exempt from forest clearances. This means that very few projects in states like Himachal Pradesh will come under the purview of this law, she said. Another concern is the dilution of existing laws, including those governing the need for environmental clearances and Environmental Impact Assessments, she added.Additionally, there is a boom in hydropower projects across the Himalaya, including in India. According to one estimate, India is planning to build nearly 100 hydro projects in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir alone. Because they are a form of renewable energy and are recommended as a form of climate change mitigation, hydropower projects are being called “green projects”, noted Asher. She calls it a form of “greenwashing”: presenting misleading information about the benefits of a project, portraying it to be more sustainable than it really is.“So we need to look at the fragility that is induced because of this political and economic model or paradigm for this region,” she said. “It is critical that we name the institutions that are responsible, accountable. Whether it is in policymaking, or governance.”A security officer stands guard on a mud-covered street during rainfall along the Trishuli River, at Devighat, in Nuwakot district, Nepal, Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. The region was struck by devastating flash floods and mudslides following a high-altitude glacier collapse in late August. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.Data sharing and geopoliticsData-sharing and knowledge production are also deeply connected with governance, Asher added. However, the current focus is on top-down knowledge production that is not transparent. “There’s a lot of information with different institutions which is not contributing to the policy shift…and I think it is really the citizens, scientists, activists, environmentalists who have been asking why.”For instance, if a hazard inventory generated at the district level by the Himachal Disaster Management Authority is shared with panchayats and local communities, planning on how to manage resources and land use around this can be done in a participatory manner at the level of every sub-watershed in the panchayat, she said.Then of course, there is the question of data sharing at a larger scale: between countries. While some data sharing arrangements have been made between countries, some are applicable only during the flood season, pointed out Ulka Kelkar, executive director of Climate, Economics and Finance at WRI India.“You need them around the year because the pattern is changing. We need to recognize that climate change is bringing a lot of cascading and compounding risks. This is language from an older report which sounded very fancy, but now we are seeing this happening and it will lead to these kinds of surprises. It will not always be possible to warn people in time, and nowhere is safe.”The SAARC has made efforts to build a meteorological center for data sharing among the Himalayan countries, and ICIMOD, an intergovernmental organisation in the Himalayas, comprises countries like China, India, Bangladesh that are upstream as well as downstream, and they facilitate some data sharing, she said. “The problem is that geopolitics disrupts these sorts of channels of collaboration and cooperation. For example, the Indus Waters Treaty has been disrupted which used to share a lot of data across countries. I think the last time there was systematic data sharing from China was in 2022 or 2023. So there have been disruptions.”But the upcoming BRICS Summit, which India will host in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, would be a “major opportunity” in this regard, Kelkar said.“India is the current chair of the Summit. It would be a wonderful opportunity to bring disaster preparedness into the agenda of the Summit declaration and to announce some kind of humanitarian cooperation and data sharing that can be done.”One of the six immediate demands that the People For Himalaya has made in its public statement dated September 7 is that Himalayan countries and states work urgently towards regional cooperation and solidarity, “by respecting and establishing transparent mechanisms and institutions for transboundary resource sharing, data sharing, mutual assistance during disasters”.It has also called for transparency and accountability in all climate information and knowledge production. “This includes developing early warning systems that draw on both science, lived experience and local knowledge. Combine [sic] real-time monitoring with community knowledge, memories of past disasters and systematic localised learning from earlier events is imperative rather than relying on technologies alone. We condemn the lopsided allocation of resources towards top-down and expert-centric knowledge production.”The collective has also called for a legally recognised framework for direct compensation as part of climate loss and damage at the global and country levels. Calls for climate fundsOn September 4, Nepal’s disaster authority chief told Reuters that the country had lost property, housing and infrastructure worth at least USD 2.56 billion (387.5 billion Nepalese rupees). Around 20,000 houses in flood-hit areas will need to be rebuilt. On September 2, news reports had already quoted Nepal foreign minister Shisir Khanal calling for “justice, not aid” in terms of climate-related compensation from the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters (US, China and India) for the devastation caused by the recent floods. However, Khanal subsequently issued a clarification saying that neither he nor the Nepalese government had sought climate-related compensation from India, China or the US. “Our call has been for the global community to look at this disaster from the perspective of climate change and the impact it’s having in Nepal,” he added, per a report by Times of India.India made its stand on this clear on September 4, placing the onus on developed countries.“India has consistently maintained that climate change is a common challenge, and action in this regard must be based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Developed countries who historically are responsible for the emissions and have contributed overwhelmingly to this present crisis, must take lead in reducing emissions and supporting developing countries by way of finance and technology transfer to meet this challenge,” said Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs in a media briefing, adding that India has extended its solidarity and support to the government and people of Nepal and will continue to do so as its neighbour.Structures on the bank of the Trishuli river remain damaged and covered in mud and silt in the aftermath of the recent flash floods, in Nuwakot district, Nepal, Friday, September 4, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.Vulnerable and developing countries like Nepal are not responsible for the climate crisis, and developing countries bear the greatest responsibility because they became rich for the large part by burning fossil fuels for more than 200 years in the name of industrialisation, said climate activist Harjeet Singh in an online statement right after the Nepal floods.“Rich countries have failed to meet their obligations to move away from fossil fuels and they have also failed to provide developing countries with adequate money needed to prepare for and respond to these impacts,” he said. Developing countries need trillions of US dollars every year, but all they get is a few billion and that too mostly only in the form of loans, he said. Though activists’ efforts have created the Loss And Damage Fund (a global climate finance mechanism to help vulnerable developing countries cope with the unavoidable economic and non-economic impacts of climate change), it has less than a billion dollars now, he said. Nepal will now need millions of dollars to rebuild and rehabilitate lives and people, but where is the money, Singh asks. “This is why we need to put pressure on developed countries and polluting fossil fuel companies to pay up and fill the Fund,” he said.Why a regional climate fund may helpBecause of how widespread and repeated these climate change impacts are becoming, insurance as a mechanism is not a protection anymore, commented Kelkar. A regional disaster or catastrophe fund would come handy here, she said.“What this does is it layers different types of government compensation, international compensation, insurance and reinsurance on market mechanisms, market rates, but also a kind of more pooled type of backing so that when you have these kinds of widespread disasters, this regional fund can step in.”There can also be some kind of alternative to insurance such as a regional insurance mechanism, she added. India is already contributing a lot to climate finance, Kelkar noted: “We are not just recipients but also donors. I believe we are the third largest developing country in terms of the climate finance that we have been giving, something just under $10 billion over the period of 2013 to 2023. There is a lot that can be done together.”