The UN's COP31 climate conference in Turkey will once again use a disaster to draw attention to its cause. This year, the spotlight will be on the tragedy in Nepal, where a glacial and rock avalanche swept through the country's north in late August. The disaster left more than 1,400 people dead and 5,000 missing, with recovery costs estimated at around $5 billion, nearly one-eighth of the country's economy. Undoubtedly, this catastrophe holds a lesson for the world, but not the one promoted by activists, who call for ever-increasing climate change budgets.
Just days after the disaster, Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said climate change makes such tragedies "more likely, frequent, and severe." Climate activist Bill McKibben wrote that Nepalis "are not the ones causing the crisis that is killing them, but we are."
Climate change may have played a role in what happened. The Global Weather Attribution group, which rarely underestimates the impact of climate change, concluded that human-induced warming had raised summer temperatures in the Himalayas by about 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the group itself described climate change as "a destabilizing factor affecting an already existing geological vulnerability, not the primary cause." Meanwhile, the largest study of glaciers in Asia's high mountain regions, published this year, mapped 60 million snow avalanches since 1990 and found no long-term trend in 85% of drainage basins.
In either case, reducing carbon emissions is not the solution. Even if every participating country pledged to make deeper cuts and fulfilled its promises this time, the Langtang glaciers would not refreeze. Spending trillions of dollars on carbon emission reductions would produce only a barely measurable drop in temperatures by the end of the century.
What the Trishuli Valley needed was no mystery. Floods become catastrophic events that claim vast numbers of lives when people in their path do not receive timely warnings. While some areas were too close to the disaster to be alerted, others had 40 minutes or more.
In Bidur, downstream along the river, school principal Rajendra Dawadi managed to evacuate and save around 900 students just minutes before the flood swept through their school. He received the warning verbally, not through sirens.
Nepal's own damage assessment calls for enhanced monitoring, the reconstruction of destroyed monitoring stations, and the installation of sirens and SMS alert systems along rivers. The initial cost of these measures would be modest, amounting to no more than $2.3 million.
Nepal did not lack climate funding; it lacked the allocation of that funding to measures that could save lives. Around 30% of the total development financing provided to Nepal was dedicated to climate initiatives, with more than $3 billion in financial commitments between 2020 and 2024, spread across a bewildering array of well-intentioned projects. Nearly half a billion dollars went to power transmission lines and smart meters, intended to replace fossil fuels with hydropower in a country that already generates nearly all its electricity from water. German assistance amounting to 6 million euros, three times the cost of the warning system, was allocated to installing solar panels to reduce CO2 emissions.
Even programs intended to help strayed from their original purpose. A $150 million disaster resilience enhancement program launched by the World Bank in 2024 promised to improve warning systems, but its efforts were subsequently scattered across droughts, forest fires, heatwaves, building regulations, and other rivers.
The Green Climate Fund came closest to addressing the actual need. In 2020, it agreed to allocate $27.4 million to strengthen the Gandaki River basin, which includes the Trishuli River, against floods and landslides. However, none of this funding went toward sirens or flood alerts. Instead, much of it was directed to irrigation projects, which help address droughts rather than floods, as well as farmer schools, ecotourism, and a gender equality action plan. A $50 million project dedicated to sensors, sirens, and backup communication systems remained on the fund's waiting list for seven years before receiving approval in 2025. Work began in March and is scheduled for completion in 2033. After donors tried everything else, they finally turned to what Nepal actually needed.
Warning systems are among the least expensive ways to save lives. The World Meteorological Organization estimates that investing $800 million in early warning systems in poor countries could prevent annual losses ranging from $3 billion to $16 billion. Bangladesh lost more than 300,000 people to a cyclone in 1970, but since 2007, weather forecasts, shelters, and drills have kept annual cyclone-related deaths below 200. Globally, deaths from climate-related disasters have fallen by more than 97% over the past century. Little of this progress was achieved through emission reductions; rather, it resulted from growing wealth and better preparedness.
Economic growth is the adaptive policy capable of addressing all risks simultaneously. Extreme poverty fell from 55% of the population in 1995 to less than 1% in 2022. Despite achieving a respectable average annual growth rate of 4.2% since 1996, most South Asian economies grew faster. The necessary reforms are unglamorous and well-known: increasing electricity production, improving roads to help exporters compete, reducing regulatory hurdles, and providing better conditions for migrants whose remittances account for a quarter of the country's economy.
A wealthier Nepal can build sturdier bridges, choose dam and road locations more carefully, maintain its sensors, and finance its own sirens.
There is a perverse paradox in activists exploiting yet another disaster to demand more of the same policies that failed its victims. If the next climate summit wants to honor the memory of those lost in the Trishuli Valley, it should fund the warning systems they lacked and then make way for economic growth in Nepal.
*Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and the author of False Alarm and Best Things First.
