On August 26, a section of glacier collapsed at an altitude of more than 5,000 metres on the Nepalese side of the Himalayas. The falling ice and rock accelerated down a steep valley at about 50 metres per second, scouring debris and transforming into a high-speed mudslide that slammed into Gyirong Port on the Chinese side just seven minutes later.
The force of the flow largely buried and obliterated the border facilities. Hundreds of people, many of them travellers, remain missing on the Chinese side. Across the border in Nepal, entire villages were swept away, leaving hundreds dead and thousands unaccounted for.
For decades, the defining image of climate vulnerability has been the low-lying island nation, where rising seas threaten to erase entire communities from the map. That threat is real, urgent and unfinished business. However, the catastrophic mudslide that tore through the China-Nepal border forces us to look beyond the waterline and consider a more complex, multidimensional map of climate risk.
The iconic risk remains sea-level rise. It is slow, inexorable and already under way. Coastal megacities from Shanghai to Mumbai to New York are investing heavily in sea walls and surge barriers. Small island states are exploring relocation treaties and purchasing land abroad as a form of climate insurance. The very predictability of this threat has allowed societies to develop institutional responses.
The second most immediately felt climate risk is extreme rainfall and the catastrophic flooding it brings. For several years, traditionally drier places such as Beijing and large swathes of inland China have suffered disastrous floods that overwhelmed infrastructure, affecting millions and exposing the limits of urban drainage systems never designed for the intensity of rain now falling from a warmer atmosphere.
The third risk is drought. This summer, a severe and persistent drought, coupled with record-breaking heatwaves, created a crisis across much of Europe. The prolonged lack of rainfall pushed major waterways, including the Rhine, Danube and Loire, to historically low levels, disrupting river transport and forcing cargo vessels to reduce their loads. France alone faces an estimated €10-15 billion (US$11.6-17.4 billion) in heat-related losses and a projected 35 per cent drop in maize yields.
Across Europe, low river levels and wildfires have exposed unexploded ordnance from World War II that had long been submerged or buried – another stark reminder of how climate change is already profoundly affecting our lives.