SOME PEOPLE, particularly outside Nepal, have rushed into a geopolitical blame game even before the slurry on the Bhotekoshi River has had time to dry, even as people are being rescued from flooded tunnels in the worst-affected Rasuwa district, and even while the death toll rises as more bodies are found far downstream or recovered from the sludge. If there is a need to assign culpability, we must search for it far from the Langtang Lirung massif of Nepal, part of whose northern flank collapsed to trigger the cascade of calamity on the morning of 26 August.
Accountability will have to be apportioned between the Global North as the longtime and largest producer of greenhouse gases, the economic model that pushes infrastructure into vulnerable river valleys, and the countries of High Asia that refuse to collaborate amid accelerating climate breakdown. The Himalaya is a young, unstable mountain chain; its geological and recorded history is replete with mass wasting and slope failure events in which vast amounts of rock and debris slide or crash downward. However, climate scientists are clear that human-induced global warming, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and allowed to accelerate recklessly over the 21st century, is responsible for the successive and escalating tragedies across our mountains.
Nepal, the world’s 52nd largest country by population, produces no more than 0.03 to 0.05 per-cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The combined emissions contribution of the entire Hindu Kush-Himalaya system is also miniscule. As the earth overheats, nature and society will be impacted not just in the upper reaches of these mountains but also downstream along all the major rivers that emanate from here – the Indus, Yangtse, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Ganga.
Southasia’s governments have collectively been unable to adjust national and regional policies in response to the galloping climate emergency. Our political custodians have been too engrossed in nurturing internal rivalries and cross-border enmities to unite and effectively represent on the world stage the interests of the fourth of the world’s population that calls this region home.
Southasia would have the clout to impact global discourse if it could speak in one voice. We need to do this because we will be the worst-hit victims of a climate turned on its head, with the northern half of the Subcontinent already the poverty trough of the world. We have summer heat hitting 50 degree Celsius in the Indus-Ganga basin, breakdown of snow cover in the Himalaya and sea levels rising along Southasia’s substantial coastlines.
Pranaya Rana