Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | After Nepal, Nations Must Track Himalayan Climate

As the list of survivors of the recent Himalayan tragedy crawls up with painful slowness, and the heavy rain-filled clouds move reluctantly away, people are beginning to ask if there will never be any respite from the tyranny of climate change. Also, will the world unite to save itself?

One hopeful sign is the claim that a Chinese-Tibetan drone has spotted what it calls the epicentre of the Himalayan landslide. Another is the report by Tara Chettry, country director in Nepal and Bhutan for the London-based Save the Children Fund, that about 600 rescued children have been sent to temporary camps. Their survival after their homes and families were washed away is a pointer to the impoverished and landlocked Himalayan country’s determination to rise above cruelly crippling geography.

That means a constant struggle against Nature. The August calamity was by no means the worst. Nepal’s disaster authority recorded more than 32,000 separate incidents between 2018 and 2024 alone, killing almost 3,700 people across a wide range of hazards, including earthquake, floods, landslides, avalanches and glacial outbursts.

But the defining event seared into Nepalese and presumably also Tibetan memory remains the 2015 Gorkha earthquake that killed 8,896 people in 2015 when the damage was estimated roughly at $7 billion or nearly one-third of Nepal’s economy at the time. It also triggered a rockfall-avalanche and air blast that levelled the village of Langtang, a once-scenic Himalayan settlement in Nepal at an altitude of 11,253 feet, killing more than 350 people.

The August 26 flash floods are reckoned to be the second-biggest natural disaster in the Himalayan nation’s turbulent history in the last 30 years, with the scale of the devastation raising fears that the death toll could climb further.

Nepal alone reports more than 2,400 missing persons. Thousands remain lost, including nearly 300 Indian tourists. Their number includes a group of 32 pilgrims from West Bengal who had reportedly registered with the Chalo Jaai Travel Club and were known to have crossed the border between Nepal and China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. Apparently, however, there is no sign of them in TAR or Chinese records.

Although the focus is still on the massive dimensions of the human tragedy, attention is beginning to shift to the economic aspect as is inevitable when dozens of bridges have to be restored, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of houses built, and roads that the angry flood waters turned into torrential rivers relaid all over again. Initial estimates place the physical damage at $1.3 billion, with Nepal’s finance minister, Swarnim Wagle, warning that recovery could cost “a few billion”.

At the same time, the demand is growing for effective concerted action to spare the people of the eastern Himalayas the heart-rending ravages of these increasing depredations.

According to reports, Gopal Thapa, the organiser of another travel group, Leaf Holidays, a Kathmandu-based travel and trekking agency, hired a chopper to try and trace 55 people, including four Singaporeans, who were being escorted to Tibet for the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage which is sacred to Hindus. The group was inside the Gyirong Port complex on the Nepal-China border when the leader last spoke with them on the morning of August 26. They had cleared immigration on the Nepali side and were queueing up to clear remaining formalities on the Tibetan side.

Among those missing are his brother, Gokarna Thapa, 33, father of two children aged seven and one, who was leading the group, as well as eight other Nepalese staff from the agency. He has tried desperately each day to call their phones since the tragic flash flood but has not been able to get through.

“It has been very painful,” he told the media.

The 55-member group was an eclectic mix of nationalities, comprising 24 Malaysians, four Singaporeans, seven Ukrainians, an Italian, three Americans, two British, one Belarusian and 13 Nepalis. “Fifty-five people missing, it is no small thing,” Thapa said. He added that he personally hired the helicopter for around US$3,000 to try to track his group members and assess the situation.

Having watched the crisis develop, Mr Thapa is not surprised. But given the resilience of human nature, and hoping against all odds, he is waiting for some good news from the Nepali authorities who are trying to rescue potential survivors. “We are hoping that from 55 at least one person, two persons, maybe 10 people survive,” he added at the time of writing. “At least one…” he is quoted as saying. “Then I can know the news about what happened there.”

BBC Television’s virtually non-stop coverage of the drama in the eastern Himalayas has included some starkly moving scenes. An old man was carried piggyback out of the dark depths of a submerged tunnel. Another man had to be dragged by his hands and feet through the sludge which a commentator warned would soon turn into “Swampland”.

Meanwhile, concerned environmentalists are demanding urgent talks to include India, China, Nepal and of course the United States of America which must help with funding, research and personnel to monitor glaciers, glacial lakes and rivers following the catastrophic flash floods in Nepal.

“Governments across the Himalayan region must establish continuous real-time, local-scale monitoring of glaciers, glacial lakes, slopes and rivers”, says a joint statement issued by the National Alliance of People’s Movements, the National Alliance for Climate and Economic Justice and the All-India Rivers Forum. The death and devastation in the Himalayas “must not be dismissed as another natural disaster”.

Will anyone take any notice? Will Donald Trump’s US?