Nepal can't just keep rebuilding

Issue #401: This week’s focus: Nepal. The August 26 flooding in the Himalayan mountains was and is terrifying. What's next for Nepal? Who's cleaning up the mess? And how can one prepare for what will definitely happen again?

Also this week: You can get sentenced to death for drugs in Egypt. The current vice president of the Philippines is on trial. Peru is angry with Iran. Ghana takes back control over its gold. The world finally acknowledged that Africa is much bigger than Greenland. And China has some surprisingly good climate news. Plus, so much more.

This newsletter has been edited by Jonathan Ramsay.

What's next for Nepal? Because the status quo is not sustainable

Refresher: On August 26, a huge piece of rock and ice broke off a mountain in Nepal and crashed into the valley below at an average speed of 193 kilometers per hour (120 mph). It fell about 1,200 metres (0.75 miles, roughly 3x the height of the Eiffel Tower). It blocked a river, so the water had nowhere to go and started building up. Eventually, the blockage broke and all that water rushed downhill at once. More than 1,350 people have been confirmed dead, with around 5,000 still missing. A total of 13,101 people have been rescued. One woman was found days after her family began her funeral.

Did you know? Climate change isn’t just about hotter weather, sea-level rise, or drought. What happened in Nepal on August 26 is an example of how climate change can also make mountains physically less stable. Read this, this, this, or this research.

What happened Maheshwar Dhakal, Nepal's climate change chief, has likely read that research and believes that, ultimately, climate change was to blame for the flooding in Nepal. And thus, foreign minister Shisir Khanal said there must be a ‘'global effort’ to help countries such as Nepal to better deal with what has happened. They say the damages stand at at least US$5 billion, an enormous sum for one of Asia’s poorest countries.

Why this matters: These demands are getting more and more frequent. So, naturally, the question of “was this really climate change?” is a hot topic. There is no definitive answer to “so, did this flooding have something to do with climate or change, or not?” yet. What is a sure thing though: As the Earth gets warmer, the ice that holds mountains together starts to melt, glaciers get smaller, frozen ground starts to thaw, and more water gets into cracks in the rocks. This can make mountains weaker and ultimately easier to break apart. So huge rock and ice falls like the ones we’ve seen time and time again in Nepal (for example in 2012, 2015, or 2017) can become more likely.

Tell me more Because of this, Khanal said that Nepal requests “the global community to come together and preserve the Himalayan ecosystem.” Sumnima Udas, member of Parliament in Nepal, wrote for TIME, emphasizing that “Nepalis are resilient. Every time a disaster hits, we mourn our dead, rebuild, and carry on. We call it karma, or fate, or the mountains doing what mountains do. But this isn’t karma. The climate is changing, and human activity is changing it. Our resilience becomes a quiet abandonment, a way for the rest of the world to admire how well we absorb losses it helped create.”

But is Nepal really responsible for this? ‘No’ is what the Nepalese government is basically alluding to. The country produces less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is among the most climate-vulnerable nations in the world. How vulnerable, you ask? The Himalayan region (also called the “Third Pole” because there’s so much ice there) is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. And this isn’t just about Nepal. As Udas writes, “nature has a way of reminding us just how interconnected and interdependent we are.” The Himalayan region stretches across parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Tibet, and China, too. This is affecting many, many millions of people.

So, who’s cleaning up this mess? That’s the million-dollar question, so to speak. For now, Nepal’s government, with the help of different organizations and other countries. There’s a United Nations fund for these kinds of events, but it’s fairly new and untested. So far, it has received pledges of more than US$822 million, but the total of paid contributions so far stands at around US$485 million; remember Nepal is asking for billions. There’s lots of talk about how to move on from this, but essentially there’s very little that can be done to stop nature from doing what nature does. “These landscapes up in the high Himalayas are very dynamic,” says Göran Ekström, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. “There's a lot of erosion going on. There were landslides there before there was global warming, but global warming has been speeding up that erosional process, and so everything is happening faster, including the number of big landslides up there.” Geologist Umesh Haritashya for The Conversation writes, ‘We cannot stop every mountain from collapsing. But we can stop a mountain collapse from killing as many people.’

What are they concretely doing? I read dozens of articles and watched dozens of interviews, so you don’t have to. Here’s everything I learned, put simply (do I speak like an LLM? Be honest):

There are two groups. One is Team ‘Adapt.’ They believe people can still live with climate change, but we have to change how and where we build, farm, and prepare for disasters. They propose:

• Get (better) early warning systems. So people know when danger is coming and can get out. This worked in Blatten, Switzerland last year, for example. There are early warning systems in place in Nepal, but on August 26, communities in some districts were alerted 38 minutes after the glacier had already collapsed.

• Build houses differently. Make them stronger and, where needed, higher off the ground.

• Build ‘flood stoppers’. So floods slow down before reaching homes.

• Change crops. Grow things that can survive the new weather, so people don’t lose their livelihoods.

• Improve drainage. Give all that water somewhere to go.

• Build smarter infrastructure. Before building a road, bridge, dam, or new settlement, ask a basic question: Will this still be safe as the climate changes?

• Share info across borders. Rivers, glaciers, and floods don’t care about national borders. Countries need to tell each other when water levels rise, glacial lakes grow, or heavy rain is coming.

• Listen to Indigenous communities. People who have lived...