The full severity of the recent natural disaster in Nepal is still not known, and the death toll continues to climb by the day even as the scale of the property destruction becomes clearer with each passing week. It will likely take several more days, if not weeks, before the true extent of the damage can be assessed with any confidence. Although scientists have been warning of the consequences of global warming ever since the earliest World Climate Conferences, few anticipated a disaster of this magnitude striking the Himalayas so directly.
The Himalayas are, in many ways, the world's third pole, holding more ice than any landmass outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Stretching roughly 3,500 kilometres across eight countries and feeding ten major river systems, including the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra, this glacial expanse is central to the geography, culture, and economy of South Asia. Nearly 1.9 billion people, close to a quarter of humanity, depend in some way on the water that flows down from these mountains, which is why the region has long been called the "Water Tower of Asia."
That water tower is now destabilising. As glaciers melt at accelerating rates, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra systems are swinging between two extremes: catastrophic floods in the near term and severe water shortages in the long term. Slopes that once held firm because of stable vegetation and ice cover are sliding more frequently, and disasters on the scale of the 2013 Uttarakhand floods, and now the recent floods in Nepal, are likely to become more common rather than less. India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan all depend on these rivers, and as warming continues to reshape the Himalayan water system, drinking water supplies, irrigation, and hydroelectric power generation across the region will come under growing strain, with knock-on effects for agriculture and food security. Much of the destructive construction under way in the Himalayas, undertaken by both India and China to serve tourism and to move vehicles more quickly through mountain terrain, is likely to carry serious long-term consequences for the entire South Asian continent.
ICIMOD, the research institute that studies the Himalayan region in its entirety, estimates that there are roughly 8,000 glaciers here, of which about 200 are now considered at serious risk. By the institute's projections, if global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, as much as 75 percent of these glaciers could disappear entirely. The warning signs were already visible in June 2013, when devastating floods struck the Indian state of Uttarakhand, triggering landslides on a scale not seen since the 2004 tsunami. That disaster began at the Chorabari Glacier, perched on the slopes of the 6,940-metre Kedarnath peak, a glacier seven kilometres long with a basin area of 38 square kilometres and roughly 5.9 square kilometres of snow cover, which fed both the Mandakini river system, at an elevation of 3,865 metres, and Chorabari Lake, at 3,835 metres. When a cloudburst struck on 16 June, the lake filled rapidly and overflowed, sending a wall of water down toward the Kedarnath temple just six kilometres downstream and on into the Alaknanda river, claiming a heavy toll in lives and property even though the lake itself was relatively small.
The underlying mechanism is brutally simple. Heavy snowfall, torrential rain from cloudbursts, and earthquakes are combining to breach glacial lakes situated thousands of metres up in the mountains, releasing enormous volumes of water that then race down the rivers with a force capable of destroying massive dams within minutes, far beyond what human engineering has been designed to withstand. Rivers have a natural capacity to absorb and dissipate flood energy, but that capacity is being steadily eroded by the hydroelectric projects built along their length and by other construction that narrows the space available for floodwaters to spread. At the same time, roads and other infrastructure are loosening trees, vegetation, and heavy rock that had remained stable on these slopes for thousands of years, and we have, in effect, engineered a landscape where landslides are now a routine occurrence rather than a rare event. The Himalayas themselves were formed by shifting tectonic plates that continue to move today, producing the earthquakes that periodically shake the region, and it is worth asking who bears responsibility for building so heavily on ground that everyone already knows to be geologically unstable.
At the World Climate Conferences, the near-total absence of direct attention to the Himalayas is striking, particularly now that Nepal is demanding compensation for damage to what amounts to a third pole and a shared inheritance of the planet. COP negotiations tend to revolve around global emissions targets and climate finance rather than the fate of specific ecosystems, and the Himalayas are too often folded into broad, generic categories such as "mountain regions" or "glacier systems" rather than treated as the distinct and consequential system they are. Because the Himalayan countries, India, Nepal, Bhutan, China, and Pakistan, have historically negotiated separately at these conferences rather than as a bloc, there has been no unified voice to push a dedicated Himalayan agenda onto the international stage. Climate summits remain dominated by coastal flooding, desertification, and the energy transition, issues that lend themselves to straightforward comparison against carbon dioxide emissions targets, whereas Himalayan impacts on glaciation, monsoon patterns, and river flows are considerably harder to model and have consequently received far less attention than they deserve.
The eight countries that effectively "own" the Himalayas have shown little interest in the long-term sustainability of a natural system that is nonetheless indispensable to the region's development, and the people who actually live in these mountains have no real power to stop the destructive projects that their national governments continue to authorise. The damage from the recent floods is not routine or minor: countless ordinary families have lost their homes, their verandas, their loved ones, and their livelihoods in a matter of hours. Communities that have lived in harmony with the Himalayan environment for generations have shaped their entire way of life, and the traditions built around it, to the specific climatic and geographical conditions of these mountains, yet the governments that claim to represent them keep pursuing "development" in ways that trample on that inheritance without any real democratic mandate to do so. The development projects sanctioned by successive governments are, in large part, why these natural disasters have occurred in the past, are occurring in the present, and will almost certainly keep occurring in the future.
This state of affairs cannot continue unchanged. At the upcoming COP31 conference, the eight Himalayan countries should form a dedicated Himalayan Climate Alliance and press collectively to have the region formally declared a "Global Climate Hotspot." Much as coastal resilience programmes already exist, mountain-specific adaptation funds could be raised and purpose-built programmes designed around the particular vulnerabilities of high-altitude ecosystems. What is needed above all is a much stronger science-policy dialogue, one capable of demonstrating precisely how Himalayan collapse will reshape monsoon patterns, agriculture, and regional geopolitics, so that the issue finally receives the international prominence it has been denied for decades.
COP31 cannot carry this weight on its own; it needs a standing institutional counterpart in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has so far treated the Himalayas as part of the broader, generic category of "High Mountain Asia" rather than as a distinct system deserving its own protective mandate. A dedicated IPCC working group on the Himalayas could anchor three things that are conspicuously missing today: formal recognition of the range's status as shared global property, comparable to the poles or the high seas, that no single state is entitled to exploit unilaterally; a systematic, continuously updated body of glacier, snowmelt, and river-flow data gathered jointly by the eight range countries rather than left to fragmented and inconsistent national surveys; and a standing negotiation architecture that feeds Himalayan science directly into COP decision-making, rather than leaving each country to negotiate the issue piecemeal, as happens now. Without that institutional scaffolding built around IPCC-level analysis and data, even a successful push at COP31 risks producing little more than a one-off declaration rather than the durable framework of protection, research, and negotiation that the region genuinely requires.
Rivalry between the region's two largest powers, India and China, has compounded these pressures considerably. China has consistently sought to extend its influence over the Himalayan region, and its occupation of Tibet is very much part of that broader strategy; it has also pursued numerous projects aimed at drawing Pakistan and Nepal more firmly into its sphere of influence, and it is making comparable efforts with Bhutan while undertaking large-scale construction across the Tibetan plateau itself. India, for its part, has pursued equally ambitious projects throughout the Himalayan region and in the various Indian states that fall within it. The world has paid remarkably little attention to the destructive consequences of either country's activities, and it is unfortunate that no international platform currently exists that could bring these two giants together to negotiate a path toward development that is harmonious, properly planned, and genuinely environmentally sound.
The Himalayas belong to the world as a shared social and natural inheritance, standing alongside the North and South Poles, the Amazon rainforest, and the seven oceans as common systems from which all of humanity benefits. Responsibility for protecting this inheritance falls most heavily on China and India, the two largest countries with a stake in the range. Nearly thirty global climate conferences have taken place to date, and COP31 is scheduled for this November; over the last five or six of these summits, negotiators have reached numerous agreements on shared global resources, on cutting carbon emissions, and on reducing pollution in a planned and systematic way, yet the Himalayan region has gone almost entirely unmentioned throughout.
Against this backdrop, the Nepalese government is now seeking compensation from the countries most responsible for global carbon emissions, treating the glacial damage caused by rising temperatures as a form of climate-induced natural disaster deserving of compensation rather than charity. Yet while the anger directed at carbon emissions is entirely legitimate, climate change is not the sole cause of the destruction Nepal has just experienced. As the saying goes, not every misfortune has a single author, and the flooding in Nepal has multiple contributing causes beyond global warming alone: the five hydroelectric power stations built on the Trishuli River, extensive deforestation, alterations made along riverbanks, newly built settlements, dams, tunnel excavation, and construction undertaken for tourism and road access along the rivers have all played a part. Only a rigorous scientific study can determine precisely how much each of these factors contributed to the destruction that has occurred, and given that the Nepalese government is ultimately accountable to its own citizens, it would have served the public better had officials acknowledged this domestic dimension of the disaster alongside their case against polluting nations abroad.
There is, of course, precedent for this kind of claim. Small island nations facing existential losses from climate-driven disasters have been demanding compensation from major polluters for years, and after protracted and often contentious negotiations at successive climate conferences, wealthier nations have agreed in principle to provide adequate investment and compensation, even though this exchange of funds has yet to materialise in full. Developing countries with high emissions, including China and India, have faced counterarguments that they too bear responsibility for global warming through their continued reliance on fossil fuels and should therefore also be expected to pay into any compensation scheme. Nepal's decision to join this argument, explicitly naming India and China as the countries from which it is seeking compensation, appears to be the first instance of such a claim being made in quite this form, and it remains to be seen how it will play out in the wider politics of the region. Coastal flooding and submersion from rising seas have been predicted for decades, and small island nations have so far been the primary group to demand a substantial response and compensation for the damage they face; African nations later secured a dedicated loss-and-damage adaptation fund at the COP conference held in Egypt, arguing that polluting nations must answer for the environmental destruction those countries are experiencing. Nepal's claim is notable as the first to spotlight damage to a specific ecosystem and a shared regional inheritance within Asia, though it differs from these earlier cases in one important respect: coastal and African nations bore almost no responsibility for the local environmental changes driving their losses, whereas the Nepalese government's own choices have played a significant role in shaping the damage Nepal is now confronting.
It is entirely reasonable for Nepal to seek compensation from the world's major polluting nations. What remains genuinely uncertain is whether this episode will change Nepal's posture at future global climate conferences, and if it does, it will be worth watching closely how much that shift ends up affecting India in particular.
Ultimately, the stakes here extend well beyond any single flood or any single country's compensation claim. The Himalayas sustain the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems that give life to nearly 1.9 billion people, regulate the monsoon patterns on which the region's agriculture depends, stabilise the regional climate more broadly, and act as a carbon sink through their forests and alpine ecosystems. Should this system collapse under the weight of continued warming, the consequences will be nothing short of catastrophic: floods driven by glacial melt, long-term water scarcity, declining agricultural output, the loss of unique biodiversity, and rising geopolitical tension across the whole of South Asia.
Yet COP negotiations continue to prioritise emissions targets and climate finance while sidelining ecosystems like the Himalayas almost entirely. With no unified Himalayan bloc to demand recognition, and with mountain adaptation funding remaining minimal compared with what has been mobilised for coastal resilience, millions of mountain communities are left dangerously exposed, and the world continues to overlook the global ripple effects that a Himalayan collapse would set in motion. The Himalayas deserve formal recognition as a global climate hotspot within the COP framework, backed by dedicated mountain-specific adaptation funds capable of addressing glacial melt, disaster risk reduction, and community resilience directly. The countries spanning the range, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, and China, should form a genuine Himalayan Climate Alliance to negotiate as one voice, and Himalayan climate research on monsoon disruption and water security needs to be woven far more deliberately into IPCC and COP reporting than it has been so far.
The message, in the end, is a simple one: saving the Himalayas means securing Asia's water supply for generations to come, and a collapsing Himalayan system means a collapsing monsoon. Protecting these mountains is, quite literally, protecting the lives of nearly two billion people, which is why grassroots voices from mountain communities need to be mobilised at COP side events, civil society coalitions across South Asia need to be strengthened, and the international community must be pushed to recognise the collapse of the Himalayan ecosystem as the global emergency it has already become.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a researcher, campaigner, and an environmental justice activist. He is a columnist too. He advises the Climate Action program for Centre for Earth Leadership and Sustainability (CELS). He has been associated as a volunteer for the campaign for equity and justice for several campaigns at different levels in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and India, since 1987. As part of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) India, he provides social, technical and legal advice to pesticide poisoning communities. His writings and campaigns inform and capacitate people on environmental violations of governments and industries and ways to secure justice. He has been a passionate international campaigner on the climate crisis, ecology, and the environment. For more information about the work of this author, see his full profile.
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