Nepal disaster highlights climate, geopolitical plight
Countries like Nepal are not large emitters but are disproportionately affected by climate change. Nepal’s catastrophic landslides — which have killed hundreds with thousands more unaccounted for — underlined the plight of developing nations in climate disasters: They are not large emitters but are disproportionately affected. Accelerating snow and glacier melt likely caused a glacier to break off and slam into a valley more than 4,000 feet below, registering as a 5.2 magnitude quake on seismographs. “Nepal is paying an extraordinarily disproportionate price for a crisis it did not create,” one of its lawmakers told The New Yorker. Managing Himalayan mountains and rivers — which requires coordination between China, India, and Nepal — is extraordinarily fraught, especially as China transforms its upriver control of Asian waterways into “ strategic leverage,” a Project Syndicate columnist argued.
Countries like Nepal are not large emitters but are disproportionately affected by climate change.
Nepal’s catastrophic landslides — which have killed hundreds with thousands more unaccounted for — underlined the plight of developing nations in climate disasters: They are not large emitters but are disproportionately affected.
Accelerating snow and glacier melt likely caused a glacier to break off and slam into a valley more than 4,000 feet below, registering as a 5.2 magnitude quake on seismographs. “Nepal is paying an extraordinarily disproportionate price for a crisis it did not create,” one of its lawmakers told The New Yorker.
Managing Himalayan mountains and rivers — which requires coordination between China, India, and Nepal — is extraordinarily fraught, especially as China transforms its upriver control of Asian waterways into “ strategic leverage,” a Project Syndicate columnist argued.