Beyond Disaster: Witnessing Climate Breakdown in Nepal

During the past four days in Nepal, I participated in humanitarian activities organized through our program EduCaB and our local partners from ColdFeet Foundation in communities within Nuwakot District affected by the catastrophic glacial lake outburst flood originating in Langtang area, at the border with Tibet. The villages where we worked were described by local authorities as among the least affected areas. Yet even there, the scale of destruction exceeded ordinary human comprehension.







Disaster literature often distinguishes between the measurable consequences of extreme events and the subjective experience of witnessing them. Standing in these landscapes, that distinction rapidly dissolves. Tens of kilometers downstream from the initial glacier collapse, enormous boulders, some comparable in size to large houses, had been transported by the floodwaters. Entire agricultural terraces, roads, bridges, vehicles, businesses, and settlements had disappeared. Of the numerous bridges that once crossed the Trishuli River, only two remained standing in this section: a suspension bridge and a single road bridge located furthest from the point of impact.

The physical destruction was accompanied by a profound disruption of human meaning. Local partners described the first days after the flood as scenes of overwhelming devastation. Bodies of people and animals were recovered from treetops or buried within layers of mud reaching twenty to thirty meters in depth. One colleague quietly showed us a photograph of a driver employed by their organization whose body had been carried many kilometers downstream, its injuries illustrating the extraordinary violence of the event more starkly than words can adequately convey. Such encounters resist abstraction; they transform statistics into deeply personal realities.

Perhaps equally striking was the altered geography itself. In several villages, floodwaters had reached the second and third floors of buildings situated hundreds of meters from the riverbank. Massive tree trunks now rested against upper stories of structures whose lower floors remained completely buried beneath hardened sediment. Walking across this terrain created an unsettling awareness that what appeared to be stable ground concealed entire buildings, and, in some cases, lives, beneath one's feet. The landscape seemed suspended between destruction and reconstruction, neither fully alive nor entirely abandoned.

Yet amidst this devastation, ordinary life persisted. We encountered residents removing mud from what had once been their homes. Families continued to cross the river using a manually operated cable carriage improvised after the bridges were destroyed. Mothers laughed with their young children while volunteers hauled the crossing platform by hand across the river. These moments revealed an important paradox frequently observed in disaster studies: human resilience rarely appears as heroic defiance. More often, it is expressed through the continuation of ordinary life, through work, caregiving, humour, and the quiet determination to restore routine despite overwhelming loss.











Experiencing this disaster also challenged my understanding of climate change. Much public discussion portrays climate change as an accumulation of increasingly frequent extreme events. Witnessing the aftermath in Nepal suggested something more profound. The overwhelming impression was not simply one of nature's violence, but of ecological systems reaching limits beyond which they can no longer maintain the stability upon which human societies have depended. The event conveyed less the image of an aggressive natural world than of one whose capacity to regulate itself had fundamentally weakened.

This distinction matters conceptually. Environmental governance has traditionally focused on understanding how natural systems function in order to manage human interaction with them. Increasingly, however, societies face the more difficult challenge of understanding how complex Earth systems deteriorate once critical thresholds are crossed. We are entering an era in which uncertainty itself becomes a defining feature of governance, requiring institutions capable not only of prediction and preparedness but also of adaptation under conditions that exceed historical experience.

Standing in the Himalayan valleys, it became difficult to escape the impression that humanity is crossing such a threshold. Whether this perception ultimately proves historically accurate remains to be seen. Nevertheless, for those present, the experience carries an unmistakable sense of irreversibility. It feels as though we have stepped beyond a curtain from which there is no return, not because solutions are impossible, but because the assumptions that shaped our relationship with nature over previous centuries no longer fully apply.

The implications extend well beyond Nepal. The coming decades will likely demand unprecedented capacities for cooperation, scientific learning, institutional adaptation, and collective resilience. They will require societies to cultivate not only technological innovation but also trust, humility, and wisdom. Humility, in particular, should be understood not in religious terms, but as an acknowledgment of the profound complexity of Earth systems whose functioning, and now whose destabilization, we still only partially understand.

I leave Nepal convinced that I have witnessed more than an isolated humanitarian disaster. I have witnessed a moment that symbolizes a broader transition in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Whether history will ultimately regard such events as decisive turning points remains uncertain. What is certain is that they call upon us to mobilize the very best of our scientific knowledge, our institutions, and our shared humanity.

By Mihai Lupu, Founder of EduCaB, Board Member of Academics Stand Against Poverty, Fellow Yale Global Justice program

Kathmandu, Sept. 2026