A SLOPE near the Nepal-China border collapsed recently with such force that the impact briefly registered on seismic monitors as a small earthqual(e. Within minutes, debris had surged down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli valleys, destroying the Rasuwagadhi border crossing and a cluster of hydropower stations that fed Nepal’s national grid.
Within just two days, hundreds were confirmed dead and many more people were unaccounted for. The shape of the disaster is already familiar, because South Asia has lived through a version of it before on a much larger scale.
In 2022, monsoon floods in Pal(istan displaced 33 million people, and 1(illed close to 1,700. The reflex then, as it is now, was to call it a natural disaster and leave the explanation there; the way one might describe an earthqual(e, which is an act of nature a government can only respond to, not prevent. That framing does not survive contact with the evidence.
A rapid scientific analysis by the World Weather Attribution group had found that human-caused warming had made the record rainfall significantly more likely, but the same researchers were explicit that warming was not the biggest driver of the 2022 catastrophe.
The bigger driver was vulnerability, accumulated over decades through construction on floodplains and flood defences that existed on paper more than in concrete. When international mediapersons later traced the length of the country’s flood geography, from the glaciers of Gilgit-Baltistan to the plains of Punjab and Sindh, their reporting on Pal(istan’s repeat disasters found families rebuilding on the very same ground that had already flooded them out once becauseno programme had ever offered the people anywhere safer to go.
Glaciers across the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra basins are retreating at rates now measured in double-digit metres per year, and it has been noted that unregulated hydropower construction and weak early-warning coordination are converting a possible physical hazard into a human catastrophe.
That is precisely the gap that appears to have failed Rasuwa: a supraglacial lake and a destabilising slope sitting within a documented hazard zone, monitored bilaterally rather than through any shared regional system built to catch exactly this kind of failure before it reached a populated valley.
A follow-up study put a number on the injustice underneath these tragedies.
Pakistan generates well under one per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but absorbs roughly $40 billion in damages from a single season of rain.
Nepal’s emissions footprint is smaller still.
This pattern is not confined to South Asia. The story is not much different in the Horn of Africa.
Three shifts would change this trajectory.
Disaster-prone states need early-warning infrastructure built into national security budgets, not emergency spending approved once towns are underwater. Climatevulnerable regions need to negotiate loss-and-damage finance as blocs rather than as isolated applicants. And, reconstruction after each disasterneeds to relocate the most exposed communities rather than simply rebuild them in place, because doing otherwise guarantees the next flood or drought finds the same people in the same danger. The science already exists. What is missing critically is the will to treat the next disaster asforeseeable.
Ruqia Khan Nasar Islamabad