A pre-monsoon déjà vu

Janmu Sherpa was a grandmother with a dozen goats and a tea house in Donggang in the Rolwaling Valley. Her stopover served trekkers en route to Tso Rolpa Glacial Lake and the trail over Tashi Laptsa Pass to Khumbu.

In 2018, I spent months in the Rolwaling Valley studying how mountain communities perceive climate change. Unlike my climate-anxious self, Janmu was calm, even hopeful, despite having lived through floods, landslides, and the 2015 earthquakes.

“No one knows when Tso Rolpa will burst, so we cannot stop our daily chores. Let fate decide,” Janmu Sherpa had said.

Last year, fate did decide. On 22 June 2024, the Dorji Phungmo Glacial Lake burst. The resulting flood swept through the Rolwaling River, washing away homes and hotels in Donggang. Janmu was among the missing, and later declared dead. 

I learned of her disappearance during a recent cycling trip through Panauti along the Rosi Khola, which was devastated by deadly flash floods on 28 September 2024.

Tipper trucks rumbled through the dusty road, carrying stones and gravel from unregulated quarries and sand mining along the Rosi. This was destruction disguised as development, and the crusher industries had magnified the impact of record rainfall.

On the other side of the mountain, along the Lele and Karmanasa Khola, families are still reeling from last year’s floods. Here, too, a quarrying frenzy exacerbated the destructive power of the floods.

There are thousands of untold stories like Janmu, and the estimated 200 who perished in the September floods. Most have been forgotten, their deaths blamed on fate.

I write this from afar, as Kathmandu hosts the Sagarmatha Sambaad this week to draw global attention to the impact of the climate crisis on the Himalaya. The summit took place as pre-monsoon rains lashed the Rosi and Lele Valleys. Even before the start of the rainy season, more debris flows from the mining operations destroyed repaired roads and neighbourhoods rebuilt after floods last year.

The rivers that flooded Kathmandu in September 2024 are still vulnerable. Aside from a few sandbanks built by local hands, nothing has changed. No national reckoning. No systemic response. Instead, everything is blamed on climate change.

Janmu Sherpa’s story haunts me not just because of her loss, but because she shaped my journey as a climate activist. She taught me that climate action is not just about carbon or conferences, it is about livelihoods, listening, and the impossible trade-offs faced by communities where survival is more urgent than sustainability.

As monsoon clouds gather again, there is a sense of dread not just about floods, but for the apathy that follows. We are trapped in a cycle of climate inaction fueled by corruption, state neglect, and a development model that treats rivers as resources to be drained, not lifelines to be protected.

It is no longer a question of if the floods will come, but when, and how devastating they will be.

And yet, those in power remain unmoved even when disaster strikes their own backyard. We are still chasing climate finance and hosting international summits, while local insurance markets stagnate and communities fend for themselves.

To be sure, global advocacy matters. The Himalayan climate crisis must be on the international agenda. Melting glaciers here affect billions downstream. But adaptation cannot begin and end in air-conditioned conference halls. It must bring real preparedness to villages, valleys, and riverbanks of Nepal.

I visited the communities ravaged by floods in September and as I wrote in Nepali Times then, top-down responses are always too little, too late and too ineffective. The only real solution is bottom-up, community-led adaptation. Those who lived through the floods know what needs to be done, and those privileged and in power need to enable them.

Community-led adaptation is not just a buzzword. It is our only viable path forward. It means empowering local people with the tools, knowledge, and resources to protect themselves.

It means investing in early warning systems that reach the last mile and actually work, restoring ecosystems that buffer floods, and supporting indigenous knowledge that has long helped communities live in harmony with nature.

It means letting go of our belief that somehow our degrees in climate change and attendance in global climate conferences enable us to tell communities how they should be responding to climate change. It means shifting power and funding to the grassroots, where resilience is not theoretical — it is lived, practiced, and urgently needed.

As the rains return, I am reminded of Janmu Sherpa’s voice of quiet wisdom. Her innate resilience did not save her life. Let us not wait for the next flood to act. Let us protect what we still have.

Rastra Raj Bhandari is co-founder and fellow at the Himalayan Water Project, where he leads the research on climate finance opportunities for the Himalaya.