For decades, the fight for sustainable, climate-resilient, hazard-averse development in the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) has gone unheeded, and the region is witnessing frequent and severe climate-induced disasters.
The catastrophic Nepal floods of August 26 are a warning that the ‘global natural commons’, stretching from the Hindu Kush and Karakoram to the Himalayas, are in an existential crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have warned that warming in the high mountains of Asia is occurring at 0.3°C per decade, nearly twice the global average, “leading to glacier retreat, decreasing in turn the stability of mountain slopes and the integrity of infrastructure, threatening water security, livelihoods, ecosystems, and increasing disaster risk.”
Reports released on March 21, 2026, by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) found that ice-loss rates across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) have doubled since 2000. “We are trying to navigate a rapidly changing future with an incomplete map,” said one of the authors of the report. Warming is not uniform across this 3,500-kilometre range. According to the Journal of Earth System Science, the western Himalaya is warming consistently faster than the central and eastern stretches, with night-time minimum and winter temperatures rising at the most extreme rates.
Nepal is paying the price for a crisis it did not create. As it produces roughly 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is right to demand compensation for loss and damage.
Rising temperatures, effect on glaciers
Rising atmospheric temperatures shift the balance between winter snow accumulation and summer melt, causing glaciers to retreat and thin steadily. Ice that once had a thermal profile of −6°C to −20°C now has temperatures closer to −2°C, making it far more susceptible to melting.
Meltwater pools atop glaciers in supraglacial lakes and carves vertical shafts called moulins, plunging hundreds of metres through the ice to the bedrock, where it forms a pressurised liquid layer between the rock and ice. This layer lubricates the glacier, allowing it to slide downslope faster, while the resulting subglacial (between the glacier and bedrock) and englacial (within the glacier) water channels generate mechanical forces intense enough to fracture the ice.
In high-altitude environments such as the Himalayas, permafrost — ground or rock that remains at or below 0°C — acts as geological cement, holding steep rock walls together by filling fractures, joints and pores with solid ice. As temperatures rise, permafrost melts into water, triggering rock avalanches, landslides and debris flows that threaten downstream valleys.
In Nepal, a shaking equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 seismic event was recorded by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on August 26, when a 600-metre-wide section of ice and rock broke away from the northern flank of Langtang Himal at an elevation of 5,600 m and fell 1.2 km into the valley below. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey recorded unusually high ground temperatures two days before the collapse, using sensors located 10 km from the site.
This mass of ice and rock landed in the Lhende Khola, a tributary of the Bhote Koshi river, damming it. When the dam broke, it unleashed a flash flood of concrete-like mud and debris — “an inland tsunami” travelling 170 km down the Bhote Koshi Valley into central Nepal. This was no isolated event. Such collapses can happen anywhere in these mountains and warming makes them more likely.
What can be done
There is no technology to prevent such collapses. The only real option is to mitigate their impact on downstream communities, which requires regional cooperation and a shared system for real-time data exchange. High-altitude satellite and drone surveillance is urgently needed to detect early signs of cliff fracturing, permafrost thaw and glacial instability. Real-time acoustic and hydrological sensors along glacier-fed rivers could detect sudden subsurface movements or flash surges and alert downstream communities immediately. Glacial lakes need continuous monitoring and, where feasible, engineered drainage.
River flood zoning must account for valley slope. Steeper slopes concentrate damage vertically, requiring infrastructure to be located much higher above the riverbed, while gentler slopes spread destruction horizontally, demanding an entirely different zoning approach.
Hydropower policy needs to be rethought, with a firm ban on construction above a defined elevation. The Avay Shukla Committee (Court on Its Own Motion vs State of Himachal Pradesh and Others) and the Ravi Chopra Committee both recommended restricting major hydropower projects or subjecting construction activities above 2,200 metres to detailed expert review.
The proposed Chenab-Beas river-linking project — an 8.7-km tunnel through the steep slopes of the Pir Panjal Range in Lahaul and Spiti district, near Koksar village in Himachal Pradesh, at an elevation of 3,140 metres (10,300 feet) — needs serious rethinking. The rationale for diverting more water from the western rivers of the Indus system may appear logical on paper, but the project is located in a fragile Himalayan ecosystem, and its likely environmental impacts make it eminently avoidable.
Every development activity in the IHR must be evaluated in light of the changing geological realities of the Himalayas. There should be a moratorium on all development projects until each is rigorously reassessed for its environmental impact, hazard-averseness and climate resilience.
Archana Vaidya is an advocate and the founder of the Forum for Environment Legal Policy Research (FELPR)