Blame the West for the melting of the Himalayas

ON the morning of August 26, a wall of ice, rock and water tore down from Langtang-Lirung through the Bhotekoshi valley into Nepal and Tibet. Villages vanished. Bridges that had stood for generations were gone within minutes. Over 270 bodies have been recovered; more than a thousand people, many of them foreign trekkers on the Langtang route, remain missing. Ten hydropower projects along the river, including the 111-MW Rasuwagadhi plant, were damaged or swept away entirely. This is not a natural disaster in the simple sense of the phrase. It is the arrival, in real time, of a bill the Himalaya did not run up.Even before the debris has settled, a familiar argument has begun to circulate: that this is a story of reckless mountain development. Too many roads, too many dams, too many towns built where nothing should be built. And that the region has, in effect, brought this upon itself. There is truth buried in the development critique, and I will come to it. But the argument, as it is being made, gets the arithmetic backwards. The Indian Himalayan Region and its neighbours across Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet have contributed a vanishingly small share of the emissions that have pushed global temperatures up by roughly 1.8 degrees Celsius in the Himalayas. The mountains did not write this problem. They are simply where it is now being paid for, first and hardest.This is the essential fact from which any honest accounting must begin and that is, the Himalaya is a victim region before it is anything else. And a victim region does not owe the world an apology for the disaster inflicted upon it. What it is owed, in the language now used at climate negotiations, is loss and damage. Compensation and support commensurate with harm it did not cause.To understand why the harm is now arriving in this form, one has to start underground, in permafrost, the layer of soil and rock that has remained frozen, often for millennia, binding mountain slopes together the way rebar binds concrete. As the region warms, this permafrost is thawing. Slopes that held for centuries are losing their structural integrity, and what were once stable rock and ice faces are collapsing, exactly as investigators now believe happened at Langtang-Lirung. This is why the Hindu Kush Himalaya is increasingly, and rightly, called the Third Pole. After the Arctic and Antarctic, it holds the largest reserve of frozen fresh water on Earth. But unlike the poles, tens of millions of people live in its shadow, along its river basins, inside the radius of what its ice can do when it lets go. The emissions driving this thaw were not generated here. They were generated overwhelmingly by the industrialised economies of the global North. The consequence, a slow motion existential crisis for mountain populations is being lived out entirely here.This is why adaptation has become, for the Himalaya, not a technical footnote but the central political question of our time. Adaptation is not a slogan. It has a precise and unglamorous meaning: where we are permitted to build, and where we are not. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report already identifies mountain regions and their river basins as global hotspots of climate vulnerability. Not as one risk among many, but as among the most exposed geographies on the planet. Two zones deserve to be named specifically. The first is any slope sitting above thawing permafrost, where the ground itself can no longer be trusted to hold. The second, and the more urgent for planning purposes, is the river basin. The valley floor, the terrace above the river, the confluence points where towns have historically clustered because that is where water and flat land meet. These are precisely the zones the IPCC identifies as most exposed to exactly the kind of cascading ice rock water disaster that struck the Bhotekoshi.None of this is a story that belongs to Nepal alone. Cross the border and the same geology, the same warming, and the same exposure continue into Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir. India's Central Water Commission tracks nearly 2,500 glacial lakes across the Himalayan states, of which a 2025 government assessment marked over 50 as carrying very high risk. Himachal Pradesh tops that list. The state government mapping has shown the number of glacial lakes capable of triggering a flash flood nearly doubling in under five years, and the state now carries the highest count of lakes classified as high risk by the National Disaster Management Authority. In Jammu and Kashmir, a district-level risk assessment for Kishtwar has already named specific valleys, and these are Padder, Machail, Dachhan, Marwah, Warwan as being in the direct path of a potential outburst, threatening not just settlements but a fragile high-altitude national park ecosystem alongside them.Uttarakhand offers the starkest warning of all, because it has already lived this twice. In June 2013, intense rain combined with the outburst of the Chorabari glacial lake to unleash the Kedarnath disaster, killing thousands. In February 2021, a rock and ice avalanche off Ronti Peak, not a lake failure this time, but the same underlying permafrost and slope instability now implicated at Langtang-Lirung tore down the Rishi Ganga valley in Chamoli. That destroyed one hydropower plant, crippling another, and killing or disappearing roughly 200 people, most of them dam workers. That two such disasters, of different immediate mechanisms but the same root cause, have already struck one Indian Himalayan state within a decade is not a warning for the future. It is a pattern already in progress, and it should settle any argument about whether the decommissioning question applies only to Nepal.It is in this context that a demand has to be raised that almost no one is willing to raise. Some hydropower projects in the most exposed Himalayan river basins need to be decommissioned. This will sound, to planners and to investors, like heresy. But the logic is straightforward. Run-of-the-river hydropower was built on an assumption of hydrological stability that no longer holds. When 10 projects along a single river can be knocked out in a single morning, the calculus that justified their construction — the assumption of steady flows, predictable glacial melt and manageable flood return periods — has been overtaken bythe physical reality of a warming Third Pole. Continuing to build, and to leave standing, high risk infrastructure in these corridors is not resilience. It is the deliberate placement of capital and, more gravely, of people, in the path of a hazard we can now see clearly. Decommissioning is not an anti-development position. It is what adaptation actually requires when the physical evidence tells us a location has stopped being safe.This brings me to the second, harder truth, and the one closer to home, our home, all those living in the Himalayas. Even as we insist, correctly, that the Himalaya is a victim of a crisis it did not create, we cannot escape our own responsibility for how our towns and houses are being built inside that crisis. Across the hill states, urban expansion has continued to follow the logic of the plains. It is a kind of Lajpat Nagar in the mountains. Dense construction on steep, geologically unstable slopes, unregulated cutting of hillsides for roads and buildings, drainage systems designed for a climate that no longer exists. Landslides that were once rare events are now a monsoon season regularity, and much of this is not glacial fate but local planning failure. Holding the global North accountable for the temperature rise does not exempt us from the question of whether our own building codes, land use plans and settlement patterns are fit for the mountain we actually live on.The Himalaya's demand to the world, then, has two parts, and both must be made together. First, loss and damage financing that matches the scale of a crisis the region did not cause, and a hard, immediate reckoning with which hydropower assets in exposed river basins can no longer be considered safe to operate. Second, an honest, internal accounting of how we build, where we build, and whether our own towns are worthy of the mountains that shelter them. The ice did not ask to become the fault line of the climate century. But it has, and what happens next depends on whether we can hold both truths. The truths of victimhood and responsibility in the same sentence, without letting either one cancel out the other.

Blame the West for the melting of the Himalayas

The emissions were generated overwhelmingly by the industrialised economies of the global North, the consequences of which are being borne here

Tikender Singh Panwar

Blame the West for the melting of the Himalayas

The emissions were generated overwhelmingly by the industrialised economies of the global North, the consequences of which are being borne here

Tikender Singh Panwar

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