Out beyond the suffocating bottleneck of the Kathmandu Valley exit with its haze of exhaust fumes and dust, the Prithvi highway plunges down into the dramatic gorge of the Trishuli river.

For those travelling between Nepal’s capital and its second-largest city Pokhara, as I did on a few occasions last year, the Trishuli river system then becomes a near constant companion throughout the journey.

Slicing through deep stone gorges, the Trishuli runs alongside the road, its waters sometimes a churning ribbon of glacial turquoise but, more often than not, the colour of muddy jade.

Impressive, though, as the river is, it’s the massive scale of the landscape and topography through which it passes that strikes you most.

It was the acclaimed American writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, whose wonderful book The Snow Leopard, that I read while still in my twenties, who once described Nepal as “a country that awakens the soul and challenges the imagination”.

Rarely, however, has it challenged the imagination quite the way it did last week, as video footage emerged showing the unheralded surge of flash-flood water across the Tibet-Nepal border that swept all before it, and to date has killed over 600 people and left at least 2,426 missing.

To describe the scenes showing the wall of ice, water, rock and mud that tore through communities destroying homes, markets, bridges, roads and hydropower dams as apocalyptic-like would be no exaggeration. The number of those affected is almost certain to rise, such is the remote and inaccessible nature of this region in one of the poorest countries in Asia.

Indeed, it is the impact of that poverty that took me as a reporter to Nepal last year,

where I was covering the work of Scotland’s longest-serving international healthcare charity, the Edinburgh-based EMMS International.

For years, EMMS ran a project improving access to quality healthcare and, in particular, palliative care in rural Nepal for some of the poorest communities.

A young boy looks at the list of missing flood victims outside the emergency ward of the Maharajgunj Medical Campus, part of the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital, on August 29, 2026 in Kathmandu, Nepal. A sudden flood swept through the Bhote Koshi River basin in northern Rasuwa on August 26, damaging settlements, roads and energy infrastructure as rescue teams searched for residents and foreign travellers reported out of contact. Hundreds were reported missing, as the death toll started to climb. (Photo by Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images) (Image: RITESH SHUKLA)

‘Best way it can’

THIS weekend, the charity has issued a statement saying that it was in contact with its partners in Nepal and “developing plans to support in the best way it can”.

In an emergency appeal launched by EMMS this weekend, a member of one of the charity’s partners in Nepal described how lucky members of his team were last week as the flood surged down the Trishuli river system.

“We were traveling from Pokhara to Kathmandu by vehicle on August 26. By approximately 10am, I heard the reports of devastating floods that had taken lives, destroyed homes and infrastructure, and affected the Prithvi Highway,” the partner told of his team’s journey that morning.

“The very bridge we had passed by only a short time earlier collapsed within seconds, severing access between communities and the main highway. Had we been just a couple of hours behind, we too could have been stranded on the road.”

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Nepal’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has already reported that up to 80 bridges and over 30 miles of paved highway had been damaged or swept away. The destruction has hampered efforts to reach survivors and deliver emergency supplies to remote communities in a country deeply vulnerable to natural calamities.

Just last year, a flash flood on the Bhotekoshi – which is part of the Trishuli river system – was caused by the bursting of a glacial lake and killed nine people.

“No-one would have predicted the magnitude and the scale. This was definitely beyond one’s comprehension,” Sudarshan Neupane, the country director for development charity WaterAid, told reporters of last week’s much greater flood.

“A lot of these communities are now cut off and due to the topography, it is impossible for the government to reach some of these locations.”

For now, though, even as the safety of survivors, rescue of victims and relief operations are paramount, the search for answers has already begun as to both the cause of the catastrophe and the capacity by Nepal and the international community to respond.

Some environmental and humanitarian observers have already pointed to the fact that, in many ways, Nepal last week was just the latest victim of a “perfect storm” of two colliding factors.

The first of these has been the failure by governments and other bodies to heed years of warnings from scientists and civil society that climate change and global warming would make disasters such as Nepal’s more intense and harder to predict.

The second is the extent of massive cuts in international aid budgets that have left what were already impoverished and vulnerable communities and nations even more so.

As Sunil Acharya. an international climate policy and just transition specialist based in Kathmandu summed it up: “This is what the cost of delaying global climate action looks like.”

Acharya, in an op-ed article for The Guardian, warned: “Nepalis and Tibetans must not pay the price – with their lives, livelihoods and money meant for education and health – for global heating caused by wealthy states.”

People view photographs of bodies recovered after the floods, displayed outside Maharajgunj Medical Campus where unidentified bodies are being taken, on August 29, 2026 in Kathmandu, Nepal. A sudden flood swept through the Bhote Koshi River basin in northern Rasuwa on August 26, damaging settlements, roads and energy infrastructure as rescue teams searched for residents and foreign travellers reported out of contact. Hundreds were reported missing, as the death toll started to climb. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images) (Image: Getty Images)

Early warnings

Like other experts, he argues that Nepal needs stronger early-warning systems, better monitoring of glaciers and unstable slopes, cross-border communication between Nepal and Tibet, and all-round greater investment in preparedness.

While a phenomenon such as glacial avalanches like that identified as the cause of last week’s Nepal floods have always been a hazard, experts say, there is a risk that they will become more so in the future, as the earth’s climate warms.

But scientists also say there are limits to human agencies preventing them, albeit that better warming systems, such as those now in place for tsunamis, would permit evacuation in some cases.

Climate policy specialist Acharya argues that it’s not that early-warning systems are futile, but more a case of being “honest about their limits”. He gives the warning system in the Bhotekoshi Valley located in the high Himalayan mountain region along the border between Tibet and northeastern Nepal as an example of the problem.

As one of the primary pathways of last week’s catastrophic floods, the sudden, debris-laden surge destroyed upstream hydrological stations before they could register a rising water level and trigger an alert. “The system was designed to detect a more gradual rise in water levels,” Acharya explains.

“This flood arrived as a massive surge of rock, mud and water, destroying the very instruments meant to detect it.”

While full investigations around this are still under way, he says that the event still shows how quickly hazards can cascade in a warming mountain environment.

The first task, says experts like him, must be to stop making the crisis worse though global warming, a point also made by Jonathan Bamber, professor of Glaciology and Earth Observation at the University of Bristol.

Scientists like Bamber say the greater Himalayan region, called High Mountains Asia (HMA), is often referred to as the third pole because it contains more glacier ice than anywhere outside the polar regions.

Many of these glaciers lie along the northern border of Nepal and China, forming an east-west arc of the Himalayas. Tibet is an autonomous region of China.

Bamber says data shows the rate of warming has accelerated significantly over about the last four decades and, as a consequence, glaciers around the world have been melting faster.

“They find that the rate is greater for the most recent decade compared with the long-term mean for every region except Iceland. For the HMA, the increase is about 25%. For the European Alps, it is more than double,” Bamber wrote recently in The Conversation, an online portal that publishes academic-authored news.

‘Unprecedented’

THE glaciologist says that increased glacier melting is only one of many consequences of living in a warming world and that the unprecedented wildfires across Spain and France, the heatwaves across Europe, and more intense and common droughts “are all consequences of a climate system that is out of equilibrium”.

Like many scientists, Bamber says we have the know-how and technology to address the climate crisis – so this is not the main problem.

An Aerial view shows debris and mud covering settlements following flash floods on August 29, 2026 in DevGhat village, Nepal. Authorities said the flash floods were triggered after a mass of ice, mud and rock collapsed into a Himalayan river near the Nepal-China border, leaving hundreds dead or missing and causing widespread damage in affected districts. Authorities continued the gruelling search for victims, many buried under metres of mud, as both China and Nepal issued fresh flooding alerts. (Photo by Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images) (Image: Getty Images)

“What is lacking is the political will and vision. If this is not forthcoming, melting glaciers are just one aspect of this human-made climate crisis, and the consequences will be devastating,” warns Bamber.

But as previously mentioned, there is another factor to this “perfect storm” of which Nepal was the latest victim.

For just as there has been a failure by governments and other bodies to

heed years of warnings over climate warming, this has also coincided with massive cuts to international aid budgets, leaving already impoverished and vulnerable communities and nations even more so.

For decades, countries like Nepal and others equally fragile have been making efforts to strengthen both economic and physical infrastructure, improving preparedness, and protecting livelihoods.

International aid has contributed to everything from healthcare and disease eradication, education, water and sanitation, transport, energy grids, and even digital access and anti-corruption strategies in many regions of the world. Most importantly, perhaps, it has often focused on building community resilience.

But as international aid is scaled back, or in some cases almost stopped entirely by major country donors, that resilience is rapidly eroded and vulnerability grows.

It only takes a disaster like that in Nepal, say humanitarians, to push some nations’ capacity to respond beyond breaking point.

Just how this second factor impacts places like Nepal at ground level was brought home to me while there last year, when my visit came in the wake of an announcement by US President Donald Trump’s administration that it was taking an axe to foreign aid, eliminating 83% of programmes run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In one sweeping six-week purge, this did away with entire categories of development work that took decades to build up. In one rural hospital in a remote part of Nepal, I listened as the only Nepalese doctor and two nurses who worked there, providing medical care for thousands in the region, told me that their jobs were gone because of US aid cuts.

Multiply this countless times over in a country like Nepal and across similar vulnerable nations and you get some idea of the damage done to community resilience even before being faced with the enormous burden suddenly brought on by disasters like last week’s.

Figures show that climate-related extreme weather events including floods, severe storms, wildfires, and prolonged droughts impacted over 87.8 million people globally in recent tracking cycles.

For Nepal, the worst is far from over. The coming days will severely test the country’s early-warning systems, disaster response capabilities, healthcare infrastructure and, above all, that community resilience.

It could well put immense political pressure too on the new administration of Prime Minister Balendra Shah, who was elected in March after a bloody youth uprising toppled the previous Nepali government last year.

It’s estimated that approximately 15 million people in Nepal live within 31 miles of glacier-fed river basins, putting them in the direct path of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and rock-ice avalanches supercharged by rising temperatures.

Writing in his now famous book The Snow Leopard many years ago, Peter Matthiessen, in one passage, provides what for today is an even more

thought-provoking description of Nepal’s incredible landscape. “These rocks and mountains, all this matter,

the snow itself, the air – the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”

Wake-up call

AS last week’s glacier collapse and subsequent unprecedented flash floods cruelly reminded, there is indeed tremendous and massively destructive potential in such a landscape.

Nepal’s disaster is a wake-up call that the climate crisis is not a distant threat of the future and perhaps a harbinger of a far greater threat unfolding.

It reminds us, too, of the crucial importance in enabling poorer at-risk countries to build their own resilience capacity with the help of international aid.