Global warming increased flash flood risk in Nepal, analysis finds

Global warming likely contributed to the deadly flash flood in the Himalayas in August, according to an analysis by the research initiative World Weather Attribution (WWA) released on Thursday.
At least 1,400 people died and more than 5,000 remain missing after a large section of a mountain, including a glacier, collapsed in the border region of Nepal and China in late August. 
The resulting rock-ice avalanche rapidly transformed into a debris flood and then a water-dominated flash flood that travelled downstream at average speeds of 188 kilometres per hour, the WWA said.
It said that climate change was not the sole cause of the disaster, but likely weakened the rock. A large earthquake in Nepal in 2015, warmer temperatures and more meltwater may also have weakened the rock years before the collapse, the analysis said.
'Climate change is thus best understood as a destabilising factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause of the failure,' the WWA said.
Climate researcher Ben Clarke said the disaster was not an extreme weather event.
'But the fingerprints of climate change are still clear to see in long-term changes,' he said.
Glaciers in the region have been losing mass for decades at a rate equivalent to more than half a metre of thinning per year, the WWA said.
Nepal's early warning systems for flooding had helped save lives, the report said. However, the August flood was beyond scope.
'No existing early warning system could have provided sufficient lead time or prevented the scale of impacts observed in the worst-affected areas, highlighting the limits of adaptation,' the WWA said. 
'In a rapidly warming Himalaya, increasingly extreme and complex hazards are exceeding adaptation capacity, resulting in loss and damage. This is occurring against a baseline of a high frequency of large earthquakes, which both destabilises slopes and hampers recovery from successive disasters.'