“It is a travesty of climate justice that those least responsible for the crisis are hardest hit.” This statement was made by Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Today, Nepal is living inside this very sentence. I come from Jammu and Kashmir, another part of the Himalayas where the mountains are not distant landscapes but part of everyday life. They are the roads we travel, the rivers we cross, the slopes we depend on and landscapes we watch changing. Last year, I wrote about the Chisoti cloudburst in Kishtwar, the devastation that followed, the painful loss of lives and challenges of rescue operations in the mountains. Watching the devastation in Nepal last month, I felt a familiar pain. Our Himalayan mountains are changing rapidly because of climate change, and the ecosystems that people have depended on for generations are beginning to disappear. I still remember visiting natural springs in Poonch, J&K, as a child, with my grandparents. When I return to some of those places today, the springs are no longer there.In J&K alone, scientists have identified 55 glacial lakes vulnerable to Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs), including 10 classified as critically vulnerable. Professor Avtar Singh Jasrotia, head of the Department of Remote Sensing and GIS at the University of Jammu has also flagged accelerated expansion and ice melt at several glacial lakes, including Sheshnag Lake in Anantnag.The region has witnessed a growing series of climate and geological hazards. Forest fires have affected large areas of J&K, with 926 incidents reported during 2025-26. Land subsidence has been reported in areas like Kalaban village in Poonch, Sunderbani in Rajouri and in Doda, while cloudbursts and flash floods continue to expose communities in the mountainous districts. The Chisoti cloudburst last year that impacted the Mata Vaishnavi Devi route in Katra was a painful reminder of how quickly a disaster in the mountains can overwhelm local infrastructure and complicate rescue and relief operations.‘Development’ increasing mountain vulnerabilityThe Himalayan landscape is being altered in ways that can increase this vulnerability. A recent University of Jammu study found that 28% of the area it assessed falls within high or very-high landslide susceptibility zones, with several vulnerable areas located along major road corridors. Across the mountains of J&K, roads, tunnels and bridges are often presented as symbols of connectivity and development, but their construction also means cutting slopes, removing forests and disturbing natural springs, meadows and pastures on which mountain communities depend. At the same time, the decline of J&K’s natural water bodies adds to this problem. A recent CAG report found that 518 of 697 lakes in the Union territory had either disappeared or shrunk. The loss of these natural water bodies is particularly worrying in a region already witnessing the depletion of its springs and other traditional water sources. Lakes, wetlands and springs are not merely features of the Himalayan landscape, they help regulate water and absorb excess runoff.These changes have made one thing increasingly clear to me, climate vulnerability is not determined by emissions alone. It is also shaped by the condition of the ecosystems that protect people, the infrastructure built around them and the resources available to respond to disasters. What I have seen in J&K has also changed the way I look at disasters elsewhere in the Himalayas, including in Nepal. Climate change arrives in these mountains not only as a rise in global temperatures but also through a changing cryosphere, disappearing water bodies, unstable slopes and communities increasingly exposed to hazards they have limited capacity, infrastructure and resources to prepare for. That is where the question of climate justice becomes unavoidable.The devastating August 26 event in Nepal’s Rasuwa district sent a powerful mixture of water, ice, rock and sediment downstream, destroying homes, roads, bridges and critical infrastructure. While initial reports described it as a glacial collapse, subsequent satellite and scientific analysis pointed to a more complex chain of events. Scientists are still assessing whether rising temperatures and changes in the Himalayan cryosphere contributed to destabilising the glacier and surrounding rock. What is already clear, however, is that a warming and rapidly changing mountain environment is producing hazards that are becoming harder to monitor, predict and prepare for. Nepal’s disaster is, therefore, is a reminder of the unequal burden of a crisis that mountain communities did little to create but are increasingly forced to live with.Climate change is not a conference theme or a target year in a policy document. For countries like Nepal, it has become a question of survival.A question of survivalThere is another uncomfortable lesson in Nepal’s catastrophe. How long can we continue to believe that we are safe simply because the disaster has not reached us yet? Some of those who recorded the rushing debris and floodwaters were standing in places they believed were safe, unaware of how quickly the situation could change. When it did, they started running. We have been taking a similar approach with climate crisis, as if the consequences will always remain somewhere else. They will not. Nepal contributes only a tiny fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions while remaining highly vulnerable to climate impacts. Around 46% of Nepal’s land area is covered by forests, according to the country’s Ministry of Forests and Environment. That raises a question the global climate debate has never adequately answered:How should countries be compensated for protecting ecosystems that benefit the entire planet?The emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere came overwhelmingly from a much larger global economy. The consequences, however, do not remain where those emissions originated. They reach families who have never owned a factory or driven a large fleet of vehicles or extracted fossil fuels.A forest preserved in Nepal does not only benefit Nepal. A stable mountain watershed does not only benefit the village beside it. The rivers originating in the Hindu Kush Himalaya support hundreds of millions of people directly, and much larger populations downstream.Nepal sits in one of the world’s most rapidly-changing mountain environments, facing increasingly frequent extreme events, from glacial lake outburst floods like the 2024 disaster in Thame village to the recent climate disaster.The Hindu Kush Himalaya is home to more than 67,500 glaciers, according to International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), but the region is warming rapidly and glaciers are retreating. The ICIMOD’s latest assessment found that the rate of glacier ice loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya has doubled since 2000, with glaciers losing an average of 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975. Why it should concern IndiaNepal’s disaster has once again shown how quickly a mountain hazard can cascade through an interconnected system. But this is not only a problem only for Nepal. The Himalayas stretch across five countries – India, Tibet, Bhutan, Pakistan and China – and the rivers, glaciers and mountain slopes that connect them do not recognise political borders. India has identified around 200 high-risk glacial lakes across the Himalayan region, with the Union government now working to establish early-warning systems for 188 of them.The Indian Himalayas have seen its own set of warnings: the 2021 Chamoli disaster in Uttarakhand, the 2023 South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood in Sikkim, cloudbursts in J&K have all shown how quickly extreme events can overwhelm settlements and infrastructure in mountain valleys. For India, this matters even more because much of the Himalayas within its territory are sustenance for millions of people who depend on its rivers, glaciers and mountain ecosystems. Yet, the region is still understood and monitored largely through separate national and administrative systems. The physical system itself does not work that way. Glaciers, rivers, snow, slopes and permafrost do not stop at political borders, a hazard developing high in one part of the Himalaya can have consequences hundreds of kilometres downstream. The problem, therefore, is not simply a shortage of data but fragmented and sometimes outdated information. India’s experience with South Lhonak showed that identifying a hazard is meaningless if monitoring systems cannot reliably survive the environment, or warnings cannot reach people in time. What the Himalayas need is not merely more data collected within individual countries, but continuously updated and shareable information that allows scientists and authorities to see the mountain system as one interconnected whole. The warning signs may exist but the bigger question is whether they are being systematically monitored. In Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir, a trekker named Moin Manhas recently raised concerns after observing changes in glaciers and high-altitude terrain during expeditions in the Pir Panjal region. He urged the J&K government and local administration to identify vulnerable glacial lakes and undertake scientific monitoring, risk assessment and mapping. While his warning may not be the first, it points to a wider challenge for India’s Himalayan states. It raises the question of how quickly observations from people on the ground can be verified by scientists, incorporated into official monitoring systems, and where necessary translated into early warnings for communities downstream.The problem with Nepal’s clean energy transitionInterestingly, Nepal’s energy story makes the climate justice argument more complicated than it already is. Hydropower accounts for roughly 94% of Nepal’s installed electricity capacity and the country has increasingly looked to clean electricity not only to meet its domestic needs but also to export power. The latest disaster, however, has exposed the vulnerability of that transition. The floods damaged 431 MW of Nepal’s electricity-generation capacity, around 10% of the country’s total, forcing Nepal to halt electricity exports and rely on imports from India.The irony is difficult to ignore, the infrastructure Nepal is building to support a cleaner energy future is itself increasingly exposing Nepal to climate-related disasters.Nepal’s experience should also make India and other countries like China look more closely at its own hydropower energy ambitions. The floods in Punjab last year showed how events in the mountains can have consequences far downstream, affecting rivers, agriculture and communities far from the source of the disaster. The question is not whether hydropower is clean compared with fossil fuels. It is whether projects planned on the assumption to restore climate of the past are safe enough for the climate of the future.The world cannot ask vulnerable countries to decarbonise, protect forests and adapt to climate change while leaving them to finance the consequences alone. If adaptation finance arrives only after a village has been washed away, it is no longer adaptation – it is reconstruction where countries with limited responsibility for climate change end up borrowing money to repair the damage caused by a crisis they did little to create.For those of us who call the Himalayas their home, what happened in Nepal should serve as a reminder that our mountains are changing as one ecosystem, even though communities across them experience these changes separately. Nepal is not an isolated warning. From its valleys to those of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and beyond, people are already witnessing the changes. Climate justice must begin with recognising this shared vulnerability.Kanwal Singh is a writer and policy analyst from Jammu & Kashmir.