New Delhi, India – On the morning of August 26, the Himalayan landscape above Nepal’s Rasuwa district changed in minutes.
A mass of ice and rock broke loose high in the mountains and sent a violent surge of water, mud and debris down the Lhende Khola River. The torrent travelled through valleys, swept away settlements and infrastructure and eventually reached the Nepal-China border.
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The warning problem
A warming climate is altering glaciers, snow cover, permafrost and high-altitude lakes. At the same time, roads, hydropower projects, tourist facilities and settlements have pushed deeper into mountain valleys.
That combination is creating a new risk landscape in which one hazard can trigger another.
An avalanche can block a river. A blocked river can form a temporary lake. A sudden release can become a debris flow. That debris can destroy a road or bridge, block another river and create another flood downstream.
The August disaster in Nepal showed how quickly such a sequence can unfold. It also exposed a weakness in the way early-warning systems are often designed.
Many systems are built around a particular hazard: rainfall, river level or glacial lake outburst flood. But the Himalayas do not always respect those categories.
In July, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD, warned that a below-normal monsoon should not be interpreted as a safer one.
“The biggest misunderstanding is that less seasonal rainfall means lower flood risk,” said Saswata Sanyal, a disaster risk reduction specialist at ICIMOD.
“A drier monsoon can still be a dangerous monsoon,” he added, warning that seasonal averages cannot capture the cloudbursts capable of producing catastrophic flooding in mountain valleys.
The Nepal disaster went a step further.
The immediate trigger was not simply heavy rainfall.
Scientists have been examining an ice-rock avalanche and other possible processes that temporarily obstructed the river system before releasing a destructive surge. ICIMOD has described the event as an ice avalanche rather than a conventional glacial lake outburst flood, while other scientists have examined the role of local seismic activity and other high-altitude processes.
That distinction matters.
A warning system waiting for rainfall or a rising river may not provide enough time when the real trigger happens several kilometres upstream and above the line of sight of the communities below.
Kashmir’s warning signs
Thousands of kilometres away, scientists studying Kashmir’s Himalayas are seeing another part of the same problem.
A study published in the Journal of Glaciology this year mapped 155 glacial lakes above 2,500 metres (8,200ft) across the Himalayas in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The researchers found that the area of ice-contact proglacial lakes – bodies of water that form directly against the margin of a melting glacier, trapped by moraine ridges, bedrock basins, or ice dams – had increased by 26 percent between 1992 and 2024.
Five lakes were classified as having very high susceptibility to glacial lake outburst floods.
An outburst from those lakes, the researchers found, could threaten several thousand buildings, 15 major bridges, roads and a hydropower project.
More significantly, the study warned that hazards could occur in chains, with an upstream lake outburst potentially triggering secondary events downstream.
For Irfan Rashid, a glaciologist and associate professor at the University of Kashmir who co-authored the study, the implications extend beyond individual lakes.
Rashid recently told Al Jazeera that without action, the melting, thinning, and destabilisation of glaciers, seasonal snow cover, and permafrost along the Hindu Kush-Himalayas system would increase, and water shortages could become a major problem across the Upper Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins by the end of the century.
That is why the Nepal disaster resonates in Kashmir.
The landscapes are different, the rivers are different and the individual hazards may differ. But the underlying problem is increasingly similar: Communities living downstream of a rapidly changing high-altitude environment may have little time to respond when something breaks loose above them.
The challenge is particularly acute in places where roads, bridges and hydropower projects occupy narrow valleys.
Once a mountain river begins carrying enormous quantities of rock, ice and mud, infrastructure designed for conventional floods can quickly become irrelevant.
The Human Security assessment report 2026 examines how accelerating climate change is reshaping human security across the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Covering key countries and major river basins, the report highlights how climate impacts cascade across water, food, and energy systems, intensifying risks for nearly two billion people. Using a poly-risk, people-centered framework, it assesses emerging vulnerabilities, adaptive capacities, and governance challenges, and identifies priority entry points for strengthening resilience and protecting livelihoods under increasing environmental stress.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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