Solar panels, not sirens: how 'perverse' climate zealots killed thousands in Nepal

Next week, the annual United Nations climate summit will once again misuse a catastrophe to get attention. Starting Monday, the COP31 gathering in Antalya, Turkey, will highlight the devastating ice-and-rock avalanche that tore through northern Nepal’s Trishuli Valley in late August. The disaster left more than 1,400 dead , 5,000 missing and a recovery bill of nearly $5 billion, about an eighth of the country’s economy. And yes, it carries a lesson for the world — just not the one climate activists are selling: ever more spending on climate.

Within days of the calamity, UN climate chief Simon Stiell declared that climate change is making such tragedies “much more likely, frequent and severe.” Environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote that Nepalis “are not causing the crisis that is killing them: we are.” Explore More Helicopters collide below Mount Everest base camp, killing 1 person and injuring 2 German climber dies after falling from summit of Nepal’s popular Ama Dablam mountain Insane footage captures moment debris-filled flood tears through Nepal river Climate change may have played a part: The World Weather Attribution group, which rarely understates the case, estimated that human-caused warming raised Himalayan summer temperatures by about 2.7°F over the “preindustrial” average.

Yet even WWA calls climate change “a destabilizing factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause” of the avalanche. The largest study of snow avalanches across high-mountain Asia, published this year, mapped 60 million of them since 1990 — and found no long-term trend across 85% of the region. Either way, carbon cuts are not the answer. If every country attending the summit pledged deeper emissions restriction — and, for once, kept its word — the glaciers of Langtang would not refreeze.

Trillions of dollars spent cutting carbon buy a barely measurable drop in temperature by the end of the century. What the Trishuli Valley needed is no mystery: A flood becomes a mass-casualty disaster when the people in its path are not alerted in time. Thousands were swept away — including in areas that had 40 minutes or more to evacuate, but received no warning. Downstream in Bidur, school principal Rajendra Dawadi saved some 900 students minutes before the inundation hit — thanks to word of mouth, not a warning siren.

Nepal’s own damage assessment calls for more monitoring, repairs to wrecked hydrological stations, and a new system of sirens and text alerts along its rivers. The initial cost: a trivial $2.3 million. Donors have poured plenty of climate money into Nepal in recent years, but little of it has been spent on keeping people alive. More than $3 billion of international development money committed to Nepal from 2020 to 2024 was devoted to climate, scattered across a bewildering array of well-meaning projects.

Nearly $500 million went to power lines and smart meters to swap fossil fuels for hydropower, in a country that already gets almost all its electricity from water. German aid committed $6.7 million — three times the cost of a warning system — to solar panels to cut CO₂ emissions. Programs that should have helped lost their way: A $150 million World Bank disaster-resilience program promised better flood warnings, then devoted cash to droughts, wildfires, heat waves and building-code compliance.

The Green Climate Fund in 2020 approved $27.4 million to make the Trishuli’s river basin more resilient to floods and landslides — but none of it went to sirens or flood alerts. Instead, money was spent on irrigation, farmer schools, ecotourism and a gender-action plan. A $50 million project for sensors, sirens and backup communications sat in the fund’s pipeline for seven years before approval in 2025 — too late to save this year’s victims.

It is due to finish in 2033. Warnings are among the cheapest lifesavers: The World Meteorological Organization estimates that spending $800 million on early warning in poor countries would avoid $3 billion to $16 billion in losses a year. Bangladesh lost more than 300,000 people to a cyclone in 1970; since 2007, forecasts, shelters and drills have kept its annual cyclone deaths under 200. Worldwide, deaths from climate-related disasters have fallen by more than 97% in a century.

Almost none of that came from cutting emissions; it came from being richer and better prepared. Growth is the adaptation policy that covers every hazard at once. And while Nepal has dramatically reduced extreme poverty in recent years, its per-capita GDP of just $1,548 remains among the world’s lowest. The fixes are unglamorous and well known: more power generation, better roads to let exporters compete, fewer regulatory hurdles. A wealthier Nepal builds sturdier bridges , sites its dams and roads more carefully, keeps its sensors running — and pays for its own sirens.

There’s something perverse about activists using yet another disaster to demand more of the policies that failed its victims. If next week’s climate summit wants to honor the dead of the Trishuli Valley, it should pay for the warning systems they never got — then get out of the way of Nepal’s growth. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and the author of “Best Things First.”