Nepal’s catastrophic landslides — which have killed hundreds with thousands more unaccounted for — underlined the plight of developing nations in climate disasters: They are not large emitters but are disproportionately affected.
Accelerating snow and glacier melt likely caused a glacier to break off and slam into a valley more than 4,000 feet below, registering as a 5.2 magnitude quake on seismographs.
“Nepal is paying an extraordinarily disproportionate price for a crisis it did not create,” one of its lawmakers told The New Yorker.
Managing Himalayan mountains and rivers — which requires coordination between China, India, and Nepal — is extraordinarily fraught, especially as China transforms its upriver control of Asian waterways into “strategic leverage,” a Project Syndicate columnist argued.