The recent Nepal-Tibet flood disaster is indescribable in its horror, devastation and losses. Vivid CCTV imagery and personal recordings have captured the event and been shared widely across the internet, bringing home the vulnerability of communities to climate change risks. Whilst some look for blame, it’s hard to attribute fault when such disasters occur without warning, on such a scale, and with just minutes to escape their path. Of course many didn’t survive, with over 1,386 confirmed dead and over 5,130 missing in Nepal, and 43 confirmed dead and 519 missing in the Tibetan region of China at the time of writing. These figures include 848 foreign nationals.
Looking for answers
Even in the immediate aftermath, it’s natural to look for answers, to imagine what could have been done to save more lives and assess the risks of it happening again. We know that climate change is the underlying cause, posing increasing risks to communities across the world – from floods, wildfires, droughts to cyclones, sea level rise and a melting cryosphere. Nowhere is safe–not the ritzy suburbs of Los Angeles or the remote villages of the Himalayas.
Scientists have been warning of the consequences of letting human-induced climate change intensify for more than four decades. The world is responding, but too slowly in the face of growing dangers. Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (the primary driver of climate change) have continued to rise, despite warnings from scientists and readily available solutions. The last three years has seen the global surface temperature rise to 1.48oC above pre-industrial levels, effectively the target set by the United Nations 2015 Paris Agreement as the limit within which climate change could be seen as manageable – whatever we imagine ‘manageable’ to now mean.
A global problem with local consequences
Climate change disasters are delivered by nature, but caused by human enterprise in the Anthropocene–a time since the 1950s when human population has tripled to 8.3 billion and our daily activities have grown to reshape Earth’s surface and climate. This has caused massive environmental and social consequences on a global scale. The impacts are both continuous and episodic – plants, animals and people are on the move across the planet in search of safer environments – while sudden climate disasters can make once prosperous localities uninhabitable. The trend is predictable, but humanity has been somewhat nonchalant in its response despite climate science being very clear on the dangers.
Why are we lethargic in face of this existential threat to humans and other species? We do have the capability to respond to global hazards, as we did with COVID-19, where deaths were limited to around 7 million as reported to the World Health Organisation. COVID-19 was a pandemic disaster that affected everyone, everywhere, at the same time, while climate disasters typically affect small communities in different locations, at different times. COVID-19 was generally accepted as a threat widely, although disputed by a few. Climate change, on the other hand, has been rejected by many, including some of the world’s most powerful figures and corporations. COVID-19 had solutions that did not require re-organising the world, albeit shutdowns were uncomfortable and problematic. Climate change has solutions too, but these require significant transitioning of our largest industrial sectors, including energy, transport and agriculture – a requirement that generates strong resistance from those seeking to maintain the status quo.
Disaster risk reduction is working
At the international level, disaster response is organised by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) under the Sendai Disaster Framework which focuses on intervening positively in the disaster cycle through prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. This approach seeks to minimise disaster impacts by reducing risk hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Such disaster risk reduction efforts have great merit and have proven effective in improving building codes, modifying planning zones, establishing early warning systems, stockpiling supplies, developing emergency response capabilities, restoring essential services, and ‘building back better’. Real benefits include a dramatic decline in lives lost in floods and wildfires. For example, in 1970, 300,000 people died when a strong cyclone hit Bangladesh, whereas a similar cyclone in 2020 caused only 26 deaths in that country – thanks to investments in early warning systems, evacuation pathways, and storm resilience.
What went wrong in Nepal?
So what went wrong in Nepal, in valleys where flood risks are well known and recent deadly climate events are still fresh in mind; and what could have been done better? The answer in part lies in the scale and speed of this event, which quickly overwhelmed any conceivable response other than rapid evacuation. At the Tibet-Nepal border, workers and tourists alike were totally unaware of the impending inland tsunami. The early warning hydrological system was similarly overwhelmed instantly. It was left to a helicopter pilot to sound the alarm by contacting air traffic control, who informed government officials, who in turn sent warnings by mobile and mouth to mouth. Like the Japan tsunami of 2011, when 20,000 people died despite elaborate sea defenses and warning systems, some responded to the call and others dismissed the risk, but in this case, most were warned too late.
Experts believe this flood disaster was triggered by the collapse of a massive 600 m wide section of rock and glacier on the Langtang Lirung mountain at an elevation of 5,000 m. It is likely that the glacier broke off after being weakened by melting in the warming Himalayan environment. Hundreds of millions of tons of ice, rock, and soil hurtled 1,200 m down the slopes to the valley floor where it turned into a massive debris flow down the Lhende Khola (small river), Bhote Koshi river, and Trishuli river systems, overwhelming and sweeping aside everything in its path for nearly 100 km.
Several climate change-related processes combined to create this monster flood, all driven by global warming. The Himalayas, also known as the ‘third pole’, is increasing in temperature 50% faster than the global mean. According to a study by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, the Himalayas are warming at an average of 0.28oC per decade, resulting in a 65% increase in glacier ice loss, three times higher than the global average. In the last 50 years the Himalayas has lost an average 27 m of ice thickness, and over the period 1990-2020 lost 12% of their total area and 9% of estimated ice reserves. Recent accelerating glacier meltdown sounds the alarm for the nearly 2 billion people downstream who depend on sustainable meltwater.
In this Nepal-Tibet disaster, climate change set the preconditions – glacier thinning, retreating, losing mass, weakening the buttressing effect on the surrounding slopes, lubricating land slips with meltwater, and causing catastrophic mountain bedrock failures. Permafrost, that helps bind steep mountain slopes, further destabilised soil and rock, leading to a higher chance of a violent break in the glacier due to thawing.
Whilst these general mechanisms are familiar to glaciologists, calculating the risk of this happening at any location or time is difficult. But we know such events are on the increase in high mountain areas globally, for example in 2025 the Tracy Arm landslide in Alaska produced a tsunami of nearly 500 m height, although no one was killed because of the sparse population.
Climate justice is still weak
The costs of this single disaster are huge in lives lost and long-term socio-economic impacts. The repair bill is already estimated at 10% of Nepal GDP – amounting to about USD 5 billion. Against this backdrop, international aid is on the decline, falling 23% in 2025 alone. At the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in 2023, countries agreed to operationalise the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), a breakthrough after over three decades of advocacy for climate justice. But countries pledged only $752 million – far below the funds needed to address loss and damage, and recompense poor and vulnerable countries who have barely contributed to climate change at all but are suffering the consequences most. For example, Nepal contributes less than 0.01% to the global greenhouse gas emissions but has been suffering from various problems related to climate change including this devastating flood. To add to this shortcoming, the current US Administration dismantled 83% of its USAID portfolio by March 2025, denounced climate change as a hoax, and withdrew from the UN’s Paris Agreement and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), whilst pushing for more fossil fuel production.
As of July 2026, 119 countries have submitted 176 requests to the FRLD that amount to $2.8 billion, already far beyond the funds available. Nepal is requesting FRLD make an extraordinary decision to go beyond the present $5-20 million limit per application due to the total destruction of homes, schools, businesses, farmlands, roads, bridges, hydropower plants, tourism infrastructure and livelihoods in this disaster. But the prospect for addressing climate injustice, including disasters like this, seems dismal given leaders of many powerful, developed countries are shying away from taking responsibility.
Global trends working against disaster reduction
Other trends that are working against effective global responses to global problems include the deliberate weakening of institutions set up to address such problems; attacks on science institutions, science and scientists; deliberate polarisation of views and beliefs via social media; playing the blame game, including blaming immigrants at a time when climate refugees are on the rise; and increasing survivalism expressed as nationalism, patriotism, ‘me first’, and extreme prepping like billionaire bunkers.
Social scientists have recognized that growing global issues like climate change are matched by growing social-emotional difficulties – some a natural response to a sense of helplessness, and others inflamed by those who seek social polarization and disharmony. But at these times, what is most baffling is the demonstrable lack of care amongst many leaders about humanitarian issues caused by climate change and poverty.
Global solutions
Global solutions mean rebuilding trust in science and international institutions established to predict and respond to climate change; ensuring rich countries accept responsibility for climate change and support justice for poor and vulnerable countries through mechanisms like FRLD; focusing on a sustainable future where next generations can thrive; and making the capitalist economic and political system work for people and planet, not primarily the ultra-wealthy.
Local solutions
Local solutions mean empowering communities to take their safety and wellbeing into their own hands, supported by community-based learning and communicating; identifying the best interventions in the disaster risk reduction and management cycle for the local context and making sure they are implemented; and working with local specialists and experts to protect people against fast, massive events. Scientific research can still be useful to find out new ways of dealing with disasters of this type. Politicians, scientists and communities can work together to do better.
Stark choices
We know stark choices are ahead. Climate change disasters have been on the increase, a fact seen in growing decadal economic costs. Climate change is a potential existential threat to humanity as individual disasters increase in frequency and intensity, take new forms, and accumulate in impact. The 2025 Planetary Solvency Report outlines extreme risk scenarios that would result in 2 billion human deaths at 2oC of global warming, and 4 billion deaths at 3oC warming, by 2050, and a 50% loss of global GDP by later this century. This isn’t a problem to leave for another day!
Authored by Nick Schofield and reviewed by Jagannath Adhikari (both familiar with the site of this disaster).