When disaster hit Nepal this summer, causing a catastrophic collapse of a glacier in the Langtang Lirung mountain range, I knew it was going to be bad. I felt like I was watching a disaster movie. Ice and rock plunging down a mountainside, unleashing massive death and destruction below.
Around 1,500 people died that day, with many more missing and thousands more losing their homes and livelihoods. The scale was almost otherworldly. Even for someone like me, understanding the science does not make those images any less terrifying.
We know global warming was a destabilising factor in Nepal’s disaster. Thawing ground, retreating glaciers and increased meltwater production most likely contributed to weakening an already vulnerable mountainside.
I study glaciers for a living and I am a keen mountaineer. I have seen many examples of smaller-scale disasters across the European Alps, including major rockfalls on famous and popular climbing routes. Sadly these incidents are getting more common and much more deadly.
In July 2022, part of the Marmolada glacier in Italy broke away, sending ice and rock across a trekking route, killing 11 people. This year, guides stopped taking clients on routes up the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc due to the extreme rockfall danger. These are popular mountains, well known to British walkers and skiers. For guides and mountain communities, their changing condition threatens livelihoods as well as lives. It should come as no surprise that in a warming world, ice will melt and frozen ground will thaw. As it thaws, the ice that acts like glue no longer holds, weakening and changing the stability of surrounding slopes.
From 2022-2023, glaciers in the Swiss Alps lost 10 per cent of their volume. If they continued to melt at that rate they would be gone in 20 years. Imagine Switzerland and the rest of the European Alps without their glaciers. That represents an irreversible loss of a unique habitat and iconic natural environment. And the Alps are not alone. Under current climate policies, glaciers in western Canada, the US and Scandinavia are expected to lose 90-100 per cent of their mass by 2100, just 74 years away. In the Himalaya region, the rate of ice loss doubled between the 1970s and the early 2000s and has kept accelerating since.
In August 1990, I climbed perhaps the most famous Alpine route in the world: the north face of the Eiger, one of the most iconic mountaineering routes anywhere. The icefields that provide a course to the upper face have disappeared in the intervening 36 years and mountaineers today avoid the face in summer because of the rockfall danger. Just in my lifetime, I have witnessed the decaying landscape of these majestic high mountains.
Nepal’s disaster and the potential for many more highlights an urgent need for greater preparation and faster recovery. This doesn’t come cheap but we must all acknowledge that how we have lived our lives and built our economies have contributed to climate change, and we must pay for it.
Money is tight and there seems to be little appetite in the UK to pay for international aid. The government is reducing UK bilateral aid to Nepal from £45m to just £5m over the next two years – a 92 per cent cut, and among the steepest of any country in the UK’s aid portfolio.
This comes at the same time as massive and devastating cuts to foreign aid by the US. Programmes built specifically for climate adaptation, resilience and preparedness are being squeezed into a budget that can no longer sustain them at anything like their current scale. The UK government’s £5m response package for the immediate crisis is welcome, but does not touch the underlying funding cliff. Helping a vulnerable country prepare for the kind of crisis the developed world did far more to cause is a moral and ethical imperative. Writing a cheque once catastrophe hits is hardly the best approach, and ultimately costs more than tackling the issue before it results in damage and destruction.
When protection fails, recovery funds must arrive promptly. Nature reports that Nepal has applied for $20m (£15.9m) from the UN’s loss and damage fund, but joins 119 other countries awaiting decisions. Applications total $2.8bn against an available pot of $250m. A fund intended to respond to disaster cannot leave devastated communities waiting months for decisions.
Britain should press for faster decisions and effective spending from that fund, not less involvement altogether. Helping people rebuild homes and livelihoods also serves our own interests. When places become uninhabitable, displacement and instability can reach far beyond their borders in the form of increased migration. Yes, there are vital and pressing needs at home too, but treating overseas spending as money wasted, just as the need for it is rising, will not make those risks and indirect impacts at home disappear. It will only push the bill further down the road.
That viral video footage from Nepal will eventually disappear from our consciousness. But the conditions that helped make such devastation possible are accelerating. The Marmolada collapse, the closed routes on Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, the vanished icefield on the Eiger: these are early warnings. With the Alps’ glaciers on course to all but disappear this century, collapses and rockfalls like these will become more frequent, not less.
We have choices to make. We can curb global heating, improve our knowledge and help people prepare. Or we can continue to cut funds and dole out an inadequate sticking plaster when it is too late. I wish what I watched had been a science fiction film. It was all too real.
Jonathan Bamber is a professor at the School of Geographical Science, University of Bristol and Technical University Munich