When the Earth warns: Living with a warming world

Dr. Jyotismita Das and Ms. Tonmoyee Bhuyan

(Department of Zoology, Nagaon University)

Nature has always thrown floods, storms, droughts, landslides and wildfires at us. That part is nothing new. What is new and worrying, is how often these events show up now, and how much harder they hit. Climate change does not cause every single disaster on its own. But a warmer atmosphere and warmer oceans load the dice. They make the extremes more extreme. The numbers back this up. The World Meteorological Organization has recorded that the years between 2015 and 2025 were the eleven hottest ever measured. Heatwaves, heavy rain, cyclones, one disruption after another, they just keep coming.

This past summer made that painfully clear. Europe baked under severe heat as wildfires forced mass evacuations and UN climate officials have started calling it what it is, a climate emergency. In early September, Typhoon Saudel dumped torrential rain on China’s southern coast, forcing tens of thousands to flee. Add the WMO’s warning of an unusually strong El Nino building through 2026 and the picture grows more uncertain still. El Nino is natural. Warmer oceans can make its effects far more dangerous.

Then there is Nepal.

On the morning of August 26, shortly before nine, a chunk of the glacier sitting on Langtang Lirung, one of the Himalayas’ most storied peaks, gave way. Children in the valley below were on their way to school at the time. Investigators believe the bedrock holding the ice in place simply crumbled. What followed was a wall of water, mud and rock that thundered nearly 100 kilometres down the Lhende Khola and Trishuli rivers. At some points along the Trishuli, the water rose by nine metres, about thirty feet, in half an hour. The collapse itself was so violent it registered as its own seismic tremor, the kind of reading you would expect from an earthquake, not a landslide.

Here is the part that barely made headlines outside Nepal. This same stretch of river had already flooded once, just fourteen months earlier, in July 2025, when a glacial lake burst and washed away the bridge at this very border crossing. Scientists at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development had already flagged it as a river with a pattern and records show dozens of floods have struck this Nepal-China belt since 1900. The mountain kept sending warnings that almost nobody outside the valley was listening. The scale of loss is still being counted. By early September, officials in Nepal and China had confirmed over 1,300 dead, with roughly 5,500 people still missing, bodies later turning up far out on the plains in Chitwan and Nawalparasi, well over a hundred kilometres from where the mountain gave way. Economic damage is estimated between four and seven billion dollars. It is now Nepal’s deadliest natural disaster since the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, which killed around 9,000 people. That earlier quake had also triggered a glacier collapse on the very same peak, burying Langtang village and killing more than 300 people in seconds. Geologists also point to nearby Tsergo Ri, the site of one of the largest known landslides on Earth, a prehistoric event that shaped this same valley long before anyone was counting. The disaster also flattened the Rasuwagadhi border crossing, more important than its remote location suggests. It once carried roughly a third of all trade between Nepal and China, and was a gateway for pilgrims heading to Mount Kailash, sacred across four religions. That crossing is gone for now. A debris dam formed by the initial surge gave way again on August 28, sending a second flood downstream and halting rescue work for hours. Nepal and China kept recovery efforts largely in their own hands, accepting limited outside help from India, Australia and South Korea.

Sound familiar? It should. In October 2023, a glacial lake in Sikkim, South Lhonak, burst without warning and sent a flash flood down the Teesta valley, killing dozens and washing away a dam. The mountains keep sending the same message and we keep missing it. India’s own vulnerability runs deep, since so many people depend directly on the monsoon, for farming, water, daily survival. This year, floods battered Uttar Pradesh, affecting more than 3.5 lakh people across 26 districts, with the Ganga crossing its danger mark at Varanasi.

For Assam, the warning could not be closer to home. The floods of July 2026 affected over a million people and killed more than a hundred. Around 2,690 villages across 25 districts went under water, and vast stretches of farmland were ruined. Recent analysis suggests the Brahmaputra alone does not explain it. Heavy rain in the neighbouring hills triggered fierce hill torrents that made things far worse.

Climate change does not act alone here either. Deforestation, vanishing wetlands, unplanned construction, mining and weak flood planning all turn heavy rain into catastrophe. Experts keep repeating the same advice: better early warning, restored wetlands and forests, and flood planning suited to local conditions. Even after the July floods, Assam did not get a break. In early September, a landslide triggered by heavy rain in Guwahati killed three members of one family.

The question by now is not whether climate change is reshaping our surroundings, because it clearly is. The real question is whether we are ready to live alongside its consequences. Early warning systems, resilient infrastructure, protected wetlands, smarter land use, climate conscious farming, these need to become standard practice, not afterthoughts. Cutting emissions and moving to cleaner energy still matters just as much. For Assam, protecting the Brahmaputra was never about defeating the river. It is about learning to live beside it, protecting wetlands, avoiding reckless construction and trusting better forecasting.

The earth is not turning hostile on its own. We are changing the conditions it operates under, one choice at a time. Every flood, every heatwave, every landslide, whether in Langtang or Guwahati, is a message, not just an isolated tragedy. The warning is loud and getting louder. A warmer world needs a wiser society to match it. If we listen now, disaster does not have to become destiny.