Op-Ed: Nepal’s flood is not its fault

Why the West owes more attention to a rapidly warming Himalayas. 

August 28, 2026 | by Aayas D. Joshi and Richard F. Silber

This week, the world watched horrifying videos of a wall of water and debris roaring down a river in Nepal, tearing through mountain towns and killing hundreds. Those of us who have followed how climate change is ravaging the Himalayas were not surprised.

The flash floods were caused by glacial collapse in the Himalayas. As a Nepali who has documented glacial floods, and an American who spent years leading expeditions in the Himalayas, we know that this flood wasn’t just unexpected; it is a warning sign for more that could come, if the world doesn’t act now.

Five years ago, one of us (Mr. Silber) wrote a New York Times Op-Ed with our colleague Liam Torpy, warning then that the Himalayas are warming much faster than other parts of the world, at a rate estimated to be up to three times the global average.

Now, the warnings have become a pattern, with a body count: Rasuwa district in Nepal alone, where this week's flood hit, was struck by a similar disaster in July 2025, when a glacial lake outburst killed at least eleven people and caused damage more than 60 miles downstream.

How many Himalayan lakes do we need to be worried about? The answer is that nobody knows. Analysts at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) estimate there are more than 25,000 glacial lakes across the Hindu Kush Himalaya. But ICIMOD’s satellite counts cannot detect lakes hidden under snow or debris. The lake that killed eleven people in Rasuwa last year was identified only after it burst.

As of today, there is no reliable count of the lakes hanging above Himalayan towns, roads and hydropower plants.

The emissions warming these mountains are not Nepal's. The United States, for instance, is pumping more oil than any nation in history and racing to build data centers that by 2030 will consume more electricity than Japan does today.

By stark contrast, Nepal accounted for 0.05% of global carbon emissions in the year 2024. Virtually all of the electricity the country of 30 million generates comes from its rivers. Last year, 68 percent of the new cars sold in Nepal were electric, a share second only to Norway's and roughly seven times that of the United States. Nepal’s forest cover has nearly doubled since the early 1990s, from 26 percent to 45 percent. It takes the average Nepali almost two years to emit as much carbon dioxide as the average American does in a month.

For Nepalis, the grief of disaster is compounded by the frustration that we are living with the consequences of a crisis we did not create, while doing more than most to solve it.

On Wednesday, the US State Department announced $500,000 in assistance for the relief effort, at a time when up to 90 of its own citizens are reported missing in the floods.

In 2025, Washington terminated more than $300 million in USAID projects in Nepal, according to the Kathmandu Post. Among them were programs to support the government's disaster risk reduction work.

What Himalayan communities need most to prevent further loss of life is instruments: networks of ground sensors and automated early-warning systems in the high valleys. feeding real-time data to the villages below, especially during the monsoon season, and hydrological data shared freely across a border that glacial floods do not recognize.

What we ask of the global powers that most contribute to the emissions heating these mountains is to end the pattern of abandoning the Global South. The wealthy nations most responsible for the warming need to treat Himalayan monitoring as the critical infrastructure it is, not an afterthought of climate diplomacy.

What comes next? The pattern we have seen after every major flood in the region, is that there is a surge of international coverage, followed by silence. This flood, too, will leave Western headlines before the water leaves Nepali homes.

Nepal has held up its end of the bargain, while its people who did the least to cause this crisis stand at its front lines.

On Thursday, satellite images showed a new lake pooling behind a dam of flood debris 18 kilometers upstream of the Nepal-China border crossing, two million cubic meters of water. It is expected to swell up to five million cubic meters by Sunday. 

As villages cremate their dead, the next flood is already gathering.

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Aayas D. Joshi is a documentary filmmaker and video journalist from Kathmandu, Nepal, based in New York City. Joshi’s work centers communities recovering from climate disasters.

Richard Silber is the executive director of the Himalayan Climate & Science Institute and International Mountain Trekking, and a co-author with Liam Torpy of “Warming and Warnings From the High Himalayas” (The New York Times, 2021). Silber is leading an expedition to the Thame village in June 2027 to study the aftermath of the 2024 flood there.