IMPORTANCE OF COORDINATION
The experience of 2015 also confirms the importance of coordination. The government has activated the Prime Minister Relief Fund to channel international financial assistance, while foreign governments and international partners have pledged financing, supplies, specialist teams and equipment.
Deploying those resources effectively will require addressing persistent gaps in Nepal’s disaster-response capacity, from shortages of heavy rescue equipment to fragmented government data systems and inadequate backup communications.
But these needs must look to the future, too. Systemic vulnerabilities, such as the absence of automated early-warning networks along dangerous rivers and the unregulated development of infrastructure in vulnerable flood zones, continue to hinder the country’s ability to manage crises.
Because the avalanche that triggered the flooding originated in unmonitored Tibetan territory, it exposed a critical gap in transboundary monitoring and data sharing, making reliance on post-disaster diplomatic communication insufficient.
That creates a case for a Himalayan early-warning framework through which China, Nepal and India share glacier, rainfall and river-flow data in real time, giving downstream authorities more time to warn communities and protect critical infrastructure.
Such cooperation need not replace national disaster-management systems. Rather, it would recognise that countries sharing the Himalayan watershed can manage some risks more effectively when information moves across borders as quickly as the hazards themselves.
Nepal’s challenge, then, is to change what reconstruction means. The experience after the 2015 earthquake demonstrated the costs of institutional fragmentation and the importance of rebuilding with future risks in mind.
The present disaster adds another lesson: Some of Nepal’s most consequential environmental risks cannot be fully monitored or managed within its borders.
Nischal Dhungel is PhD Student in the Department of Economics at the University of Utah and Fellow at the Nepal Institute for Policy Research. This commentary first appeared on Lowy Institute’s blog, The Interpreter.