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On August 26, a wall of water tore through Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts, killing hundreds of people and leaving many more missing. Scientists are still investigating the precise trigger, but climate change likely had a role. Early assessments point to a glacial collapse — a massive chunk of ice, roughly 2,000 feet wide, breaking free high in the mountains near the Nepal-Tibet border and crashing into the valley below. The resulting surge of water, sediment and debris tore down the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers with almost no warning.
It’s the latest, and deadliest, in a string of glacial and flood-related disasters to hit the Himalayas in recent years. An August 2025 event in the village of Thame sent 100 million gallons of glacial meltwater into homes, a school and a medical clinic — remarkably, without killing anyone.
This time, the scale was catastrophic.
Saurav Malhotra, Conservation International’s lead in the region, spoke about the disaster on BBC Radio 4’s Today program.
“We cannot prevent every flood, every landslide or every glacial event,” he said. What we can do, he argued, is “drive investments into the right places to scale the actions that will reduce overall vulnerabilities” — so that when the next event happens, fewer people are in its path, and those who are will have more warning and better options.
The Eastern Himalayas is sometimes called the world’s “third pole” — the largest reserve of frozen freshwater outside Greenland and Antarctica, and the headwaters for river systems that millions of people downstream depend on. As the region warms faster than the global average, glaciers are retreating and alpine lakes are forming and destabilizing, leaving mountain communities in a precarious situation.
According to Malhotra, there’s no silver bullet for these challenges.
Instead, he argues, the approach must be two-fold: focused on nature and better infrastructure. Healthy forests and watersheds slow down water, hold soil together and reduce erosion — which can meaningfully lessen the damage a flood does once it’s moving, particularly the kind driven by heavy rain or degraded land. Alongside that, he points to more resilient infrastructure — bridges, roads and drainage systems built to withstand extreme events — and to early-warning systems sophisticated enough to give people time to move before water arrives.
“[These solutions] need to work together,” Malhotra said, “and we need to be able to scale it.”
While none of these actions would have stopped an ice avalanche high in the mountains from breaking loose, they can shape how much damage the resulting flood causes once it’s racing downstream, and how much resilience communities have when it arrives.
Malhotra also flagged a funding gap: developing countries need capital willing to absorb risk, rather than leaving governments and communities to shoulder the burden alone. Nepal is a case in point — it’s among the countries least responsible for climate change, yet faces some of its most severe consequences.
“This needs finance at a much larger scale than what we see right now,” he said. “Investing in nature is not simply an environmental investment, but an investment in water security, food security, livelihoods, infrastructure and human security.”
Conservation International’s Mountains to Mangroves initiative is shaping efforts to protect the nature this region needs to thrive. It aims to restore 1 million hectares across the Eastern Himalayas, guided by local knowledge about where restoration will do the most good. It’s one piece of the layered approach Malhotra described — a part of what determines how resilient the landscape and the communities in it are when disaster strikes.
“It is high time now that we look at disasters like this and say — how do we make the next one less devastating,” he said.
