Peter
Schwartzstein

The Nepal disaster is a punishing illustration of what climate change can look like. In time, it may also tell a broader tale about how these shocks and stresses are causing ecologically and politically vulnerable states to become all but ungovernable.

Having worked a fair bit in rural Nepal, I find some of climate change’s contribution to Nepal’s governance challenges achingly familiar. As in many other poor countries, more frequent extreme weather events are stretching already insufficient budgets, raising insurance costs, and torching key industries, among other macroeconomic impacts. This disaster, for example, has taken out one-tenth of the country’s hydropower capacity, threatens to curtail all-important tourism during peak season, while also blocking vital trade routes. At least one of Nepal’s most geographically strategic border crossings with China has been destroyed.

Some of the migration impacts are also broadly recognizable, albeit particularly extreme in Nepal’s case because of its dizzying topography. Both this kind of shock and slower-moving ones, like drought, are accelerating the emptying out of rural Nepal in ways that are jeopardizing governance across the board. Rural communities are losing the critical mass of residents required to sustain basic services, which can further propel out-migration and saddle the rump villages left behind with criminality, big and small. In turn, many urban areas are just becoming outright unwieldy under the pressure of the new arrivals. As I found while conducting research for my book on climate and violence, Kathmandu, which has at times grown faster than any other city in the world, is just one of a number of capitals to experience violence on construction sites between existing cohorts of day laborers and rural migrants, many of whom end up competing for the same jobs.

In a classic illustration of the sometimes inescapable nature of these crises, many rural Nepalis who have tried to adapt without decamping to the big city have ended up in harm’s way, too. Some valley dwellers have moved uphill to escape floods, only to lose land and/or houses to mudslides. Other villagers have moved downhill into the well-watered valleys to escape dried up springs on the hilltops, only, as in the case of many of those who perished in last week’s disaster, to run headlong into horrors at lower altitudes.

But the main reason why Nepal appears to be a harbinger of looming climate-related insecurity is connected to poor government performance, or the appearance of such. Because at the same time as officials are wrestling with all of the above, they’re also failing to deliver tolerable services and, in the process, sometimes denying people goods and amenities at prices or of a quality to which they’d grown accustomed.

This flood appears to have damaged or destroyed swathes of transmission lines and at least a dozen hydroelectric facilities, many of which were already reeling from droughts that have compromised state gains in the power sector. These floods destroy farmland and, more importantly from a food security perspective, damage critical infrastructure, including, in this instance, sections of the highway that Kathmandu relies on for much of its produce. Frustratingly, for Nepalis living in the shadow of the world’s greatest ‘water tower,’ these disasters also contaminate groundwater and gut water transfer schemes, thereby worsening access to resources that are already mismanaged and overextended by large-scale in-migration from the mountains.

The net result of all of this: a slow withering away of the state, and increased public fury when it almost inevitably fails to deliver on public expectations. Sure enough, Kathmandu’s poorly managed boom and its corresponding impacts on quality of life seemingly contributed to last year’s revolution, in which mostly young and urban Nepalis swept aside the country’s traditional political elite in favor of a populist insurgent. That man, 36-year-old Prime Minister Balen Shah, must now somehow succeed in these seemingly impossible circumstances.

None of this is to ignore or excuse decades of shoddy governance, but, well, these shocks just compound the impact of poor management, with the public often disinclined to give officials the benefit of the doubt even when they’re dealing with problems that are not of their making. They undermine even half-successful attempts to do the ‘right’ thing, ecologically speaking. Some of Nepal’s hydro ambitions, for example, look increasingly misguided. Moreover, these crises can just quite literally wipe out layers of officialdom. In the disaster zone, a number of local municipality buildings and their personnel, who are primarily responsible for emergency response, were among the many casualties.

As with many other countries in its position, Nepal has made only marginal contributions to the warming that is proving its undoing. It will have to recover from this disaster in the full knowledge that future ones are inevitable. But it’s not powerless to prevent these stresses and shocks from spilling over into violence. For one, it must ensure that reconstruction is conducted in a transparent and equitable manner, something that Nepalis feel has not been the case following previous disasters –a sensation that has often turbocharged public anger in the past. Officials must also ensure that rural displaced people, of whom there will likely be many more now, are settled in cities in ways that help avoid fueling social tensions.

Above all, Nepal needs to provide poor, farming-dependent villagers with the tools to confront a ‘storm’ that they’re often worst-placed to resist in a peaceful manner. This can mean everything from providing more services in distant communities where the central government is effectively non-existent to guaranteeing that the official presence there is not corrupt and predatory, as rural peoples often allege.

In the face of a rapidly changing climate and a world that is increasingly ungenerous with its assistance, this won’t be easy. But in order to avoid state collapse, and the accompanying humanitarian and security consequences, it is critical that both Nepal and the world – its neighbors and beyond – make preparing for and combating these climate risks central to their work.