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As Death Toll From Nepal Flood Rises, Officials Call to Tackle Warming

Five days after a calamitous flood washed through Rasuwa, Nepal, the death toll continues to climb. Authorities said Monday that 903 people have been confirmed dead, while another 4,247 are missing, as the country reels from a disaster that experts say may be linked to the melting of glacial ice.

Officials believe the collapse of a glacier on Langtang Lirung peak sent an avalanche of ice and rock careening into a valley below, where it blocked the flow of the Trishuli River. When the rock barrier finally gave way, they say, it unleashed a rush of water and mud several stories high. The floodwaters inundated villages along the river, not just in Nepal but also in neighboring Tibet, where 16 people are confirmed dead and another 546 are still missing, according to Chinese state media.

Researchers with the HiRisk project, which tracks threats from melting ice in the Himalayas, say that the shrinking and thawing of glaciers may have fueled the disaster. Over the last three decades, Nepali mountains have lost roughly a third of their ice, the U.N. says. The glacier on Langtang Lirung retreated roughly 1,500 feet between 1990 and 2020, and experts say the loss of ice may have left the slope more vulnerable to a landslide.

Further upping the risk of collapse was a warm spell that melted snow atop Langtang Lirung in the days before the flood. "That snowmelt had to go somewhere – and it may have supplied the water that lubricated the rockfall," said Umesh Haritashya, a geoscientist at the University of Dayton.

The upper Himalayas are warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, experts say, and August is the warmest time of year in the region. "While scientists are still studying the exact causes of this disaster, it is exactly the type of event that is triggered by climate change," said Wouter Buytaert, a hydrologist at Imperial College London.

U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said in a statement that a warming climate "is making tragedies like this one, and so many others around the world, much more likely, frequent, and severe, with vulnerable communities often hardest hit."

In a press conference on Saturday, Nepal's foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, called on countries to address warming. "We'd ask the world," he said, "to take climate change as one of the major challenges that Nepal and its citizens face, and this has to be a global effort."