Rasuwa: a test for Nepal and the World

OP-ED

By Shivanee Thapa Basnyat

As Nepal prepares to take the Rasuwa disaster to the United Nations, it faces two questions at once, can it establish what happened in its mountains, and can it persuade the world to respond to what the disaster reveals about a changing Himalaya?

The first instinct after a disaster is to count the dead, search for the missing and measure the destruction.

In Rasuwa, that is only the beginning.

The disaster of August 26 has forced Nepal to confront a more difficult set of questions. What exactly came down from the high Himalaya? Was it a flood, a landslide, a glacial lake outburst or something more complex? What does the event reveal about a mountain system being altered by warming? And, perhaps most consequentially, can Nepal turn those answers into a scientifically credible case for climate action and Loss and Damage?

Those questions matter because Rasuwa was not a conventional flood.

Prof. Dr. Ranjan Kumar Dahal, a geohazard and geo-disaster expert who visited the affected area, describes a violent interaction of rock, ice, sediment, snow and water that cannot easily be placed inside one familiar disaster category. What began high in the mountains as a massive movement of rock and ice transformed downstream into an extraordinarily destructive debris-laden flood.

That distinction is not semantic.

If the Himalaya is producing hazards that do not fit neatly into the categories used to map and manage risk, then the science underpinning those maps and the infrastructure built on them may also be falling behind the landscape.

Recent scientific assessments are likewise describing the Rasuwa event as a large rock-and-ice avalanche followed by a cascading flood, rather than simply a conventional glacial lake outburst flood.

And that is where the climate question begins.

Not with the assertion that climate change caused Rasuwa. But with a more demanding question, did a warming climate alter the likelihood or intensity of the conditions that produced it?

That is the question of climate attribution.

Manjeet Dhakal, Director of Climate Analytics South Asia and Lead Adviser to the Chair of the Least Developed Countries group, argues that attribution is essential precisely because climate change should not be casually declared the cause of every extreme event. The scientific task is to establish how a warmer climate has changed the probability, severity or characteristics of an event compared with a cooler baseline.

For Nepal, that distinction is critical.

Its political case may be powerful. Its scientific case has to be equally strong.

Dhakal says the climate signal emerging around Rasuwa is significant, pointing to the broader transformation of the high Himalaya: rising temperatures, long-term ice loss, degradation of glaciers and permafrost, and changing precipitation patterns at high elevations. But the next step is quantification, turning a visible climate signal into evidence that can withstand scientific scrutiny.

That is where Nepal’s own scientific emergency meets its diplomatic one.

For Dahal, the most urgent task now is not simply reconstruction. It is forensic science.

The mountain has left evidence of what happened, but that evidence will not remain unchanged indefinitely. Sediment deposits, runout distances, the nature of the material transported downstream, satellite imagery, precipitation records and changes between the source area and the river system all have to be documented while the physical signatures remain legible.

Nepal needs high-altitude precipitation stations, GPS observations, cameras and other sensors. It needs systematic comparison of what happened upstream and downstream. It needs the kind of evidence that can reconstruct the sequence of failure rather than merely describe its aftermath.

And it needs to do this across the border.

Dahal argues that Nepal should strengthen scientific cooperation with China, including high-elevation monitoring and the possibility of a dedicated geohazard laboratory. The two countries share the Himalayan hazard system, they cannot afford to study it as though the border interrupts geology.

The failure to establish stronger cross-border monitoring after earlier incidents in Rasuwa is therefore not simply a missed technical opportunity. It is an institutional warning.

Nepal has known for years that glaciers are retreating and that high-altitude lakes and unstable slopes pose risks. The problem has been less about knowing that the mountains are changing than about converting that knowledge into continuous monitoring, scenario-building and early warning.

Rasuwa has exposed that gap with devastating clarity. When adaptation itself reaches its limit There is another reason the disaster matters internationally.

Climate policy has spent years asking vulnerable countries to adapt: build stronger infrastructure, establish early-warning systems, improve preparedness and make communities more resilient.

Rasuwa raises the uncomfortable question of what happens when the event exceeds the parameters of that adaptation.

Dhakal points to an automated river monitoring system in the upper Rasuwa basin that reportedly recorded a water level of around 1.3 metres at 8:48 in the morning, before transmission stopped roughly two minutes later as the system itself was overwhelmed.

An early-warning system that is destroyed by the event it is supposed to warn against is a powerful illustration of the limits of adaptation.

It does not mean adaptation is futile.

It means adaptation has to be designed around hazards that are themselves changing.

That has consequences far beyond Rasuwa.

For years, Nepal’s hydropower development has been planned around the country’s extraordinary river systems and their economic potential. Dahal does not argue that Nepal should abandon hydropower. His argument is more fundamental: engineering geology must account for the entire upstream hazard system, not merely the immediate footprint of a dam, tunnel or power station.

Dhakal makes the same point from a climate-policy perspective. Infrastructure designed for historical conditions cannot automatically be assumed to be resilient to future ones. Nepal needs to consider future temperature and extreme-event scenarios while also examining whether its growing dependence on interconnected river-based infrastructure is creating new concentrations of risk.

The lesson is not to stop developing.

It is to stop assuming that the mountain on which development is built will remain the mountain on which the risk assessment was based.

For Nepal, however, Rasuwa is not only a question of how to prepare better for the next disaster.

It is also a question of what happens when preparation is no longer enough.

That is the territory of Loss and Damage.

Loss and Damage is particularly relevant to disasters in which adaptation cannot prevent the full extent of harm. And that harm is not confined to destroyed buildings, roads, hydropower plants or economic output.

Dhakal stresses that Loss and Damage also encompasses non-economic losses: lives, trauma, communities, cultural ties and the loss of places that cannot simply be reconstructed with a financial valuation.

This is why Nepal’s argument should not be reduced to compensation.

The Loss and Damage Fund was created within the international climate architecture to provide support to particularly vulnerable developing countries dealing with climate-related loss and damage. But it is not a simple insurance mechanism that automatically converts every disaster into a payout.

The harder question is whether the international system can respond at the speed at which climate disasters now unfold.

That is where rapid disbursement becomes crucial.

Dhakal says the Fund has a rapid-disbursement modality intended to allow support to reach affected countries without forcing them through the full length of conventional proposal and approval processes. At the time of his interview, the modality had not yet been exercised, and Nepal was calling for it to be used in response to Rasuwa.

That makes Rasuwa more than another appeal for assistance.

It is a test of whether an international mechanism designed for a changing climate can actually move when a disaster happens.

If vulnerable countries have to spend months assembling proposals while communities are struggling to rebuild homes, roads, schools and livelihoods, then the architecture exists but its responsiveness remains unproven.

Yet Nepal’s climate justice argument will be weakened, not strengthened, if it treats international responsibility as a substitute for domestic responsibility.

Dhakal is explicit on this point: climate justice does not absolve Nepal of responsibility for the risks it can control. Institutional fragmentation, land-use decisions, infrastructure planning, settlement patterns and preparedness remain Nepal’s responsibilities.

That is an important distinction.

A country can be both vulnerable to climate change and responsible for improving its own preparedness.

Those propositions are not contradictory.

Indeed, the credibility of Nepal’s international case may depend partly on demonstrating that it is prepared to confront its own failures while asking others to confront theirs.

That should also change the way Nepal thinks about disaster monitoring.

Dahal’s criticism is not that Nepal lacked all knowledge. It is that the country failed to give sufficient priority to turning knowledge about glaciers, slopes and high-altitude hazards into a functioning monitoring system capable of anticipating compound events.

The scientific lesson from Rasuwa is therefore uncomfortable: Can Nepal ask the world to act on evidence that it has not itself systematically collected?

That is particularly important as Nepal prepares to take the issue to the international stage.

The United Nations General Assembly is the right political platform for Nepal to make the case. The 81st session is already under way, with the General Debate scheduled for September 22–28 and a high-level meeting on climate action and a just transition on September 23.

But UNGA should be the beginning of the diplomatic argument, not its conclusion.

Dhakal’s advice is significant: Nepal should use the General Assembly to signal what it needs, build political solidarity and establish the urgency of the issue rather than simply turn the platform into an exercise in naming and blaming countries.

The next step is to translate that political signal into the formal climate process.

That means taking the evidence on climate attribution, the forensic reconstruction of the disaster and the experience of Rasuwa into the UN climate negotiations.

COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20, provides that formal climate-policy arena.

The sequence matters: UNGA can build political momentum. Climate negotiations have to turn that momentum into policy. And Nepal should go to both forums with more than photographs of devastation.

It should go with a scientifically defensible reconstruction of what happened, a clear account of the climate signal and attribution question, a documented assessment of losses including those that cannot easily be priced and a concrete demand for a Loss and Damage response that is capable of moving quickly.

That would make Rasuwa harder to dismiss as another tragic Himalayan disaster.

There is a temptation, after a disaster of this scale, to divide the world into victims and responsible parties.

The reality is more complicated.

Rasuwa sits at the intersection of geology, climate change, development, infrastructure and geopolitics. Its consequences crossed administrative and national boundaries. Its risks were shaped by forces Nepal did not create, but its vulnerability is also influenced by decisions Nepal makes.

That complexity should not dilute Nepal’s case.

It should make the case more credible.

The international community is already paying attention. Vulnerable countries have expressed solidarity, and the disaster has entered discussions around climate justice and Loss and Damage. Dhakal says the LDC group and other climate-vulnerable countries have responded with strong support.

But sympathy is not an outcome.

Nor is a declaration.

The test will be whether Rasuwa produces better science, stronger monitoring, more resilient infrastructure, a functioning rapid-disbursement response and a more serious international commitment to Loss and Damage.

Five years from now, the measure of success should not be how eloquently the world remembered Rasuwa.

It should be whether countries on the front line of climate change have greater access to finance, whether disaster response mechanisms can move rapidly, whether adaptation is being designed around future not historical risks, and whether vulnerable countries are still forced to divert money from health, education and development every time an extreme event tears through their economies.

Rasuwa has already changed the ground beneath Nepal’s feet.

The larger question is whether Nepal can change the conversation above it.

The General Assembly offers the political stage. COP31 offers the formal climate-policy arena. But Nepal’s strongest argument will not be the scale of its suffering alone.

It will be the evidence.

Because if Rasuwa is to become a test case for Loss and Damage, it must first become a test case for something equally important: whether the world is prepared to listen when the Himalaya changes and whether it is prepared to act before the next warning system goes silent.