I Asked a Nepal Expert How The Devastating Floods Happened. What He Said Will Shock You

Manjeet Dhakal is Advisor to the Chair of the UN's Least Developed Countries Group and Director of Climate Analytics' South Asia office. He’s been involved with climate negotiations and diplomacy for almost 20 years and now helps the world's most climate-vulnerable nations negotiate international climate policy. He's currently completing a PhD and recently published research on climate attribution in Nepal. Dr Manal Shehabi, an applied development economist and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking, who also teaches Economics for Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and sits on Oxford's Children and Climate Initiative. On August 26th, 2026, a catastrophic flood devastated Nepal's Langtang Valley. A mass of ice and rock detached from a Himalayan peak at approximately 5,200 metres and triggered a flood that has killed more than 1,300 people and left 5,000+ missing. This conversation walks through what actually happened, why the Himalayas are warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, why Nepal producing 0.1% of global emissions makes this a sobering example of climate injustice, and much more. —— Manjeet’s July paper Climate-induced loss and damage in Nepal: attribution analysis and institutional readiness for international support: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2026.1782991/full Manal Shehabi: https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/people/manal-shehabi —— Subscribe to the Climate Unf*cked podcast at https://climateunfucked.substack.com/ And connect with me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-coop/ —— Chapters 0:00 What Manjeet saw on the ground 5:08 The new kind of disaster we're facing 9:18 Why the Himalayas are called the third pole 10:13 How permafrost collapse triggered the avalanche 12:07 Why 2 billion people depend on Himalayan glaciers, and the immediate human cost 15:32 Nepal's interconnection with China and India 22:07 Why mountain regions warm faster than the rest of the planet 24:38 The science behind ice, rock, and heat absorption 25:30 Climate justice: Nepal's 0.1% of emissions 26:37 Historical vs current emissions: who pays? 28:55 Why adaptation funding isn't enough, and intergenerational injustice 34:33 What a just response to this disaster looks like 35:34 Why the Loss and Damage Fund hasn't responded 40:55 Concessional grants vs debt, and why we can't treat disasters as isolated 44:32 What you can actually do