Global warming: From Nepal to Assam to Kerala, nature’s fury is colliding with unchecked development

Over the last few years, Nepal’s weather has become increasingly unfamiliar to those living there. The Himalayan nation has experienced weather events that were once unheard of, including the first tornado in the country’s plains a few years ago.

All of this worries Sunil Acharya, an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu. It is not merely that extreme events are becoming more frequent, but that they are becoming harder to anticipate. Each new disaster seems to bring something Nepal has not dealt with before.

The latest: a glacial collapse triggering flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border, killing more than 1,200 people and leaving thousands missing.

The problem is not confined to Nepal. Chamoli district in Uttarakhand experienced a similar disaster when a glacier and bedrock collapse triggered a flood in 2021. Just this year, flash floods and landslides struck across India—from Assam and Uttarakhand to Kerala.

ALSO READ | Rescuers in Nepal pull 2 people alive from the debris 10 days after devastating floods

According to HydroSense Lab, a research facility in IIT-Delhi, India recorded nearly 2,000 such events between 2019 and 2023. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) says that studies point to an increase in reported flash floods since the 1990s.

While climate change is a major catalyst, the disasters unfolding across the region are also influenced by indiscriminate development in fragile mountain landscapes. For years, the debate has been framed as a choice between development and conservation. The human cost of that false binary is now becoming harder to ignore.

CRISIS TIME

Glacier-related floods are a particularly worrying sign of how quickly the risks are changing. Such events are occurring at shorter intervals across the Himalayan region.

ALSO READ | Nepal floods could cost insurers over $130 mln even before death, injury claims

In August, an ice patch weighing about 69 million kilos collapsed from the Srikanta Glacier in Uttarakhand’s Garhwal Himalayas, according to a study published in Natural Hazards. The glacier sits at an altitude of about 5,220 m.

The Chamoli disaster was a grim warning when a large chunk of a Himalayan glacier collapsed in the district, sending debris and water downstream, killing about 200 people. Scientists later estimated the force of the collapse to be equivalent of roughly 15 atomic bombs.

The changing nature of the floods is only one part of the problem. The other is what has been built along the rivers.

ALSO READ | Nepal floods cause at least $2.56 billion in property, infrastructure damage

“Often floodplain guidelines are not fully followed in hilly terrain,” says Kapil Gupta, an IIT-Bombay professor who specialises in urban flood forecasting and mitigation. Local pressure, he says, often pushes construction closer to rivers.

India has guidelines to keep such construction away from flood-prone areas. The Central Water Commission guidelines propose a default 100 m restriction from the edge of a river until a state completes the scientific identification and demarcation of its floodplains.

The broader policy problem has been acknowledged by NITI Aayog, which has noted that human activity can substantially increase the severity of floods and has called for strict implementation of floodplain zoning. Whether this is happening on the ground is the big question.

As Sher Muhammad, a scientist at ICIMOD, points out, “In the Himalayas, we increasingly have to consider extreme rainfall together with glacier change, glacial lakes, unstable slopes, landslides and large sediment loads. At the same time, expansion of settlements, roads and hydropower infrastructure is increasing exposure in some already vulnerable valleys.”

CONSTRUCTION GALORE

Many parts of the Himalayan region fall in highly vulnerable seismic zones, while construction has expanded rapidly.

Wetlands and floodplains are being lost. Forests are being cleared. Slopes are being cut for roads and other infrastructure.

Construction can alter drainage and destabilise terrain. When extreme rainfall or a glacial event follows, the damage can be amplified by what is already on the ground.

The Char Dham road project in Uttarakhand was launched in 2016 to widen and upgrade about 889 km of highways to two-lane roads with paved shoulders, while adding tunnels, bypasses and other structures. In 2017, the Kargil-Zanskar Road was declared National Highway 301, opening a new phase of highway development in the Trans-Himalayan region.

Highway projects in Uttarakhand have continued to expand, with the government announcing and inaugurating multiple projects in 2024, including widening stretches in Rudraprayag and Chamoli.

Better roads have opened remote parts of the Himalayas to tourists and pilgrims. Some of these destinations have become popular through social media.

Acharya says the increase in access has also brought more pressure on natural resources in high-altitude areas. “The Himalayan region is increasingly popular among trekkers and tourists, but it is also facing growing disasters. Tourism is also energy- and resource-intensive, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.

Roads, hotels and other infrastructure are bringing more people into areas exposed to floods and landslides. The development can make communities more connected and economies more dependent on tourism. It can also increase the number of people and assets that a sudden disaster can put at risk, he added.

NATIONAL ISSUE

In the South, in Kerala, major floods and landslides have continued to cause losses in life and livelihood. It is not as if the warning wasn’t loud.

Around a decade and a half ago, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil, had examined the ecological pressures building across the region, including from infrastructure, tourism, mining and other development. It recommended treating the region as an Ecologically Sensitive Area and dividing it into zones according to ecological sensitivity.

However, the report was rejected by state governments. Besides Kerala, the Western Ghats cut right through Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Critics have pointed to the rise of extreme weather events in the region—including the 2018 Kerala floods, the 2024 Wayanad landslides and the 2024 Ankola/Shirur landslides in Karnataka—and their human toll as a consequence of dismissing the report.

The report’s broader message was that development could not be separated from the ecological limits of the landscape.

“When we talk about the landslides in Kerala, there is a lot of discussion on the destruction of the Western Ghats,” says Gupta. “When you are widening roads, you are digging into slopes, thereby making some of them unstable. It is the same thing with tunnels. This is one of the reasons slopes are becoming unstable.”

As Muhammad says, the objective should not be to stop development, but to make development risk-informed.

In the Himalayan region, roads, hydropower projects and settlements in high-hazard valleys need to consider how the place is changing in a warming climate.

QUESTION OF RESPONSE

“A few decades back, floods used to be very balanced, it had a fixed timeline. Communities used to be better prepared,” says Avinash Kumar Chanchal, deputy programme director, Greenpeace South Asia. “Those knowledge and adaptive measures are no longer helping them.”

The Centre approved the National Glacial Lake Outburst Flood Risk Mitigation Project in July 2024, for Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Uttarakhand, with a financial outlay of `150 crore. The Central Water Commission also monitors glacial lakes across the Himalayan river basins using remote sensing techniques.

But is that enough for these new challenges?

In a conventional flood, water levels rise gradually. Monitoring stations can detect the change and send an alert before the water reaches communities.

The recent Nepal event was different.

“This time, the size of the ice mass was so enormous that by the time it hit the ground, it released a huge amount of energy,” says Acharya. “Even before these stations could send triggers, the flow moved much quicker.”

Some of the monitoring systems were washed away.

That raises a question beyond alerts: where do people go when it arrives?

“People talk a lot about early warning systems,” says Gupta. “But if you don’t know the drill to shift a person to a safe shelter during a catastrophic event, it is going to become harder to manage”

The question, he says, is what comes after the warning. “Where is that safe place? How many people can be saved?”

DISASTER WITHOUT BORDERS

The Himalayas span across Nepal, India, China (Tibet), Bhutan and Pakistan. So are many of the river systems that carry water from the mountains into communities downstream. A disaster in one country can quickly affect another.

Acharya says the region needs stronger cooperation on early warnings and monitoring. Existing arrangements between countries are not enough, he adds. What is missing are joint monitoring, timely sharing of information and coordinated assessment of hazards before they occur.

Muhammad says that while several bilateral mechanisms already exist, there is no comprehensive Himalayan framework covering cascading mountain hazards and development across the region. The mechanisms exist, but there is considerable scope to connect them more strongly with glacier monitoring, glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) and landslide risk, satellite observations, early warning and planning of infrastructure in sensitive mountain areas.

For Nepal, which has fewer resources to monitor these rapidly changing hazards, that cooperation is particularly important. Acharya says the country needs stronger monitoring systems and greater international support.

He adds that disasters linked to global climate change should not leave countries such as Nepal carrying the cost alone.

USAID cuts, put in place by US President Donald Trump and its erstwhile government efficiency czar Elon Musk, may also have had some impact on Nepal’s early warning systems.

The recent flood has shown the limits of systems already in place. Chanchal says communities may have had only a short window to respond to the event.

The exact timing is still being studied, but reports suggest that communities living near the border had no time to react. It took nearly 30 minutes for local authorities to report the disaster. People in the downstream areas had just 40-45 minutes to evacuate.

“Basically, the early prediction went wrong,” says Acharya. The Himalayan region needs a coordinated approach to early-warning systems, he adds.

That would be the bare minimum of what vulnerable communities deserve.