Three Questions, With Clear Answers, About the Nepal Disaster

It is known that disasters of the type that just hit Nepal are waiting to happen, there is much that can be done to prevent the scale of the disasters, but no political will exists to save these lives

There are three questions that one asks after a disaster. Was it predictable? Was it preventable? Is there anything to be done? In the face of the enormous disaster in Nepal these are the questions that should be top-most on the mind of policymakers in the Himalayan region, and yet there seems little appetite to answer them.

Let us take them one by one.

Was the disaster predictable?

No, the exact shape of this disaster was not predictable because it involves a variety of things to make a large piece of a glacier break off and fall more than a kilometre into the valley below it and trigger a massive flood. There are thousands of glaciers in the Himalayan region. It is the densest repository of ice on the planet after the polar regions and is often called “the third pole”.

It is hard to know what is happening in every single glacier, even the largest ones. As Zeke Hausfather writes, “any formal attribution of this specific collapse to climate change is premature, and single events like this are genuinely hard to attribute even after careful study. At the same time, the collapse happened on a mountain that has warmed rapidly for decades, immediately after four consecutive summers that all rank among the five warmest in at least 86 years, and in a valley that has been losing ice at an accelerating rate.”

Also read: Explainer: What Triggered the Nepal Flash Floods?

Put simply, while the contours of this specific disaster were hard to predict, these types of disaster were entirely predictable and were predicted. The science of that is simple. There are thousands of glaciers in the Himalayan region, as well as the ice caps on the mountains, and permafrost below a large part of the soil. This is the largest region of frozen water – or cryosphere – outside of the polar regions on the planet, so much so that it is often referred to as “the third pole”.

This area is also experiencing higher warming than the global average, so part of this frozen water is no longer frozen. In steady climates, the water melts and refreezes over summer and winter, now it melts more and freezes less, making the whole area more and more unstable. People tend to focus on glaciers and ice caps, but permafrost is overlooked. Glaciers occur over less than 100,000 square kilometres in the Himalayan region, permafrost is about 1 million square kilometres.

Why do I say that it was predicted? Because the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) did a comprehensive Hindu Kush Himalayan assessment report in 2019, with a whole chapter dedicated to the cryosphere. I wrote about it then, focussing on the Indus, and then again in 2021 on the larger challenges of the cryosphere, glacial lake outburst floods, and other types of disasters.

In both reports I emphasised that infrastructure along rivers, particularly hydropower projects, were uniquely vulnerable. It required no great insight to know any of this. This information is open knowledge, and it is not as if evidence of the vulnerability of Himalayan regions was not demonstrated. Nepal saw the Melamchi cascading disaster in June 2021, and India saw the Chamoli disaster in the same month. 

Was the disaster preventable?

Again, the answer is no and yes. No, because we have warmed the world enough, and keep pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, to keep it warming for decades to come. Even if we suddenly stopped all CO2 pollution right now, the atmosphere is already almost 1.5°C warmer than before we started using fossil fuels aggressively at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (we have had global temperature measuring from around 1850, although the Industrial Revolution started just before that). The atmosphere has not been this warm in thousands of years. The Himalayan cryosphere will continue to melt. Such disasters will continue.

That said, yes, there are things we could have done to prevent the scale of the disaster. Global warming caused by humans has been well known and studied for decades, but we have continued to aggressively favour fossil fuels as our principal source of energy. Industrialised countries who have burnt the most quantities of such fuels and polluted the planet (Nepal’s emissions are about 1% of the global emissions now, and historically, they are nothing) should have paid for the cost of their pollution by setting up adaptation and disaster aid funds.

Countries across the Himalayan region could have focussed on the free movement of scientists and funded far greater, more detailed, coverage of the cryosphere whose changes endanger 250 million people living in the region.

Lastly, Nepal, and all countries with residents in Himalayan region, could invest in detailed environment assessments of not just their hydropower projects but also of the communities living by rivers who are more at risk. All of these would have done much to save lives, limit damage, and make recovery quicker. 

Is there anything to be done?

To a degree, the answers are already there in the above paragraph, but it is clear also why policymakers are avoiding this question. We need to get serious about ending emissions, but the richest countries, the richest corporations, and the richest people are focussed on doing the opposite, both globally and among countries around the Himalayan region.

Industrialised countries have avoided taking their historic responsibility seriously, and will continue to do so. The countries across the Hindu Kush Himalayan region could do more to allow cross-border access and research, but they seem far more interested in a paranoid control over these areas (cough, cough, Tibet, Kashmir).

Also read: Is India Prepared to Deal With Glacial Lake Outburst Floods?

The two most important water sharing agreements in the region are being killed as a result – the Indus Waters Treaty and the Ganges Treaty (set to expire this year). There is a region-wide disaster management body, the SAARC Disaster Management Centre (SDMC) in India, but India has boycotted SAARC for a decade, and even the link to the organisation does not work. At the very least the countries in the Himalayan region could do their own assessments of the communities and infrastructure along the vulnerable riverine regions of the Himalayas, just to save their own people and their own taxpayer’s money. 

The knowledge is there. Some of the solutions are even there. That they are not being taken seriously tells us a great deal about the politics of the global moment, and whose lives are expendable. 

Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK. He was the editor of The Third Pole.

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