The real lesson of the Nepal disaster is that economic development and early warning systems protect human lives—not empty summit pledges, says Bjorn Lomborg.
The Jakarta Post
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Flood victims Ajaya Gurung (L) and Sapana Gurung salvage belongings from a sludge-ridden house along the banks of the Budhi Gandaki river at Soti Bazar in Nepal’s Gorkha district on October 14, 2026 in the aftermath of a flash flood caused by a dry landslide. PHOTO: AFP
November 6, 2026
COPENHAGEN – The upcoming United Nations climate summit, COP31, in Turkey will once again exploit a catastrophe to seize the spotlight. This year, the summit will center on the tragedy in Nepal, where an ice-and-rock avalanche tore through the country’s north in late August.
The disaster left more than 1,400 dead, 5,000 missing and a recovery bill of nearly US$5 billion, roughly an eighth of the nation’s gross domestic product. The catastrophe carries a crucial lesson for the world, but not the one that campaigners are peddling: ever-larger climate budgets.
Days after the disaster, UN climate chief Simon Stiell asserted that climate change is making such tragedies “much more likely, frequent and severe”. Activist Bill McKibben echoed the sentiment, writing that Nepalis “are not causing the crisis that is killing them: we are”.
Climate change may well have played a role. The World Weather Attribution initiative, an organization hardly prone to understatement, found that human-induced warming raised Himalayan summer temperatures by about 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet even this group concluded that climate change was “a destabilising factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause”.
Furthermore, the most comprehensive study of snow avalanches across High Mountain Asia, published this year after mapping 60 million events since 1990, detected no long-term trend across 85 percent of the region’s catchments.
Regardless, carbon cuts offer no remedy. Even if every nation at the summit pledged deeper emissions reductions and honored them, the glaciers of Langtang would not refreeze. Trillions of dollars spent abating carbon will yield a barely measurable temperature reduction by century’s end.
What the Trishuli valley needed is clear. A flash flood becomes a mass-casualty disaster when communities in its path receive no warning. While some settlements were too close to the source to be alerted in time, others had 40 minutes or more. Downstream in Bidur, school principal Rajendra Dawadi managed to evacuate and save roughly 900 students minutes before the torrent washed his school away. His alert came through word of mouth, not an official siren.
Nepal’s own post-disaster assessment emphasizes basic resilience: expanded monitoring, repairs to damaged monitoring stations and riverbank sirens paired with automated text alerts. The initial price tag is a modest $2.3 million.
Nepal has never lacked climate funding; it has lacked funding directed toward saving lives. Nearly 30 percent of all development assistance to Nepal has targeted climate initiatives, exceeding $3 billion committed between 2020 and 2024 alone, scattered across a fragmented array of well-intentioned programs.
Nearly half a billion dollars financed transmission lines and smart meters to substitute fossil fuels with hydropower, in an economy that already generates virtually all its electricity from water. German aid allocated 6 million euros ($6.73 million), nearly three times the cost of a nationwide early warning network, to install solar panels aimed at marginal CO₂ reductions.
Even initiatives ostensibly designed for resilience drifted off course. A $150 million World Bank disaster-resilience program launched in 2024 promised improved warning mechanisms, only to dilute its resources across droughts, wildfires, heat waves, building-code enforcement, and secondary river basins.
The Green Climate Fund came closest to addressing the threat. In 2020, it approved $27.4 million to bolster flood and landslide resilience across the Gandaki river basin, which encompasses the Trishuli. Not a cent went toward early warning sirens or river sensors. Instead, funds were directed to irrigation schemes tailored for droughts, farmer field schools, ecotourism development and gender action plans.
Meanwhile, a dedicated $50 million proposal for sensors, sirens and redundant emergency communications languished in the fund’s bureaucracy for seven years before securing approval in 2025. Implementation began in March, with completion slated for 2033. Only after exhausting every other priority did international donors finally address Nepal’s most critical need.
Early warning infrastructure remains among the most cost-effective lifesavers in public policy. The World Meteorological Organization estimates that an $800 million global investment in early warning systems across developing nations would avert $3 billion to $16 billion in annual losses.
In 1970, a catastrophic cyclone killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh; since 2007, forecasting, cyclone shelters and community evacuation drills have kept annual cyclone fatalities below 200. Over the past century, global deaths from climate-related disasters plummeted by more than 97 percent. That achievement owed almost nothing to emissions mitigation; it was driven by economic development and systematic preparedness.
Economic growth serves as the universal adaptation strategy against physical hazards. In Nepal, extreme poverty fell from 55 percent in 1995 to under 1 percent by 2022. Yet while annual GDP growth has averaged a respectable 4.2 percent since 1996, the country continues to lag regional peers.
The necessary reforms are pragmatic and unglamorous: expanding power generation, upgrading transport corridors to make exports competitive, dismantling regulatory burdens and safeguarding migrant workers whose remittances account for a quarter of GDP. A wealthier Nepal can engineer resilient bridges, construct dams and highways with greater technical rigor, sustain its hydrometric sensor networks and finance its own warning infrastructure.
There is a grim irony in campaigners seizing upon another tragedy to demand more of the top-down spending priorities that failed these victims in the first place. If delegates at the upcoming summit genuinely wish to honor the dead of the Trishuli valley, they should finance the warning networks those communities were denied, and get out of the way of Nepal’s economic development.
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