Deadly Flooding in Nepal Highlights Asia’s Climate Vulnerability

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Rebecca Choong Wilkins** (0:08)
Oh my god, oh my god.
For much of the past week, the world has watched in shock as the aftermath of devastating floods in Nepal comes into focus.
More than 1,000 people were killed, and 1,000 more are still missing after a glacial collapse swept ice, mud, rock, and water through valley communities along the country's border with China.
For all of us covering it, the thing that really stood out were the images. The images here we had of the border, the checkpoint with China, of that flood of water, and the sheer destructive power of that wave, I think really took people aback. Bloomberg's Clara Ferreira Marques has been covering the disaster. We are still in the early stages of recovery. There is still a hunt for workers, hundreds of workers on various hydropower projects that have disappeared. Close to 12,000 people have been rescued, and search teams in Nepal are still pulling out survivors. The hope of finding anyone alive is fading fast. It's difficult to access for rescuers, it's difficult for people to come down the mountain themselves, and of course, the disaster has affected a lot of the infrastructure, the bridges, the roads, and all of that is complicating this still further.
Beyond the immense human toll, the costs to rebuild are likely staggering. Nepal's finance minister has estimated the cost of rebuilding to be $4-5 billion, roughly a tenth of the size of its economy. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Asia. It's a $45 billion economy. It, you know, had a devastating earthquake in 2015, which set the country back billions of dollars in reconstruction costs, left hundreds of thousands homeless. As part of its recovery, Nepal has relied on its tourism industry. It's also invested in hydropower projects, hoping to spur domestic development with cheap, reliable electricity and to export surplus energy to neighboring countries. But Clara says the location and the scale of this disaster has threatened both. This is on the border between Nepal and China, so Nepal and Tibet. It's a popular pilgrim route. You have all this sort of administrative structure and military structure, so a lot of people working at checkpoints, at health centers. And then you have the hydropower workers. So they really make up a very substantial portion of the people missing, given the sheer scale of hydropower construction in the wider region and in this area in particular.

**David Fickling** (2:48)
One thing that we can see very clearly is that these instances are becoming much more common.

**Rebecca Choong Wilkins** (2:52)
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He says a warming planet is creating special hazards for mountainous regions around the globe.

**David Fickling** (3:02)
Because these mountain landscapes are held together by ice and the ice is melting. Eight of the ten worst years for glacier ice losses have been since 2016
And if you look in the eastern Himalayas, landslides are displacing about five times more material now than they were in the 1980s. There's about 15 million people who live at regions of risk of these sorts of floods.
About 10 million of them alone are just in high mountain Asia, essentially the broadly Himalayan region.

**Rebecca Choong Wilkins** (3:38)
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Choong Wilkins, in Fuwanha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show, flooding on the northern border of Nepal has devastated the region and claimed more than a thousand lives. But Nepal isn't the only country affected by this kind of natural disaster.
We look at what triggered the floods, what countries around the world are doing to prepare for similar events, and how one critical industry sits at the center of the challenge, both as a solution and a petrol problem.
Scientists currently believe the floods in northern Nepal were triggered when a massive chunk of ice and rock broke away from a glacier high in the Himalayas. That in turn sent a powerful surge of water downstream through the river and into communities.

**David Fickling** (4:43)
You can't say that one particular landslide was caused by climate change, because landslides in general are contingent on such a complicated array of things that go wrong, a mountain collapsing, seasonal floods and that sort of thing. It's very hard to detect the signal of climate change. But in general, one thing that we can see very clearly is that these incidents are becoming much more common, because these mountain landscapes are held together by ice and the ice is melting.