Climate
After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood
In Wayanad, part of the ecologically fragile Western Ghats, a school at Vellarmala had no training in trauma recovery when the landslide hit — so its teachers built their own response, one now echoed by research and by disaster-recovery efforts in Nepal and the Philippines. What worked, what it took, and where it still falls short for the next school this happens to.
On the morning of July 30, 2024, one of Kerala’s deadliest landslides tore through Chooralmala and Mundakkai in Wayanad. As hillsides collapsed under relentless monsoon rain, entire neighbourhoods were swept away, killing 298 people. Among the dead were 33 students from the Vellarmala Government Vocational Higher Secondary School (VHSS). The school campus itself disappeared beneath mud and boulders, taking with it classrooms, a playground, a library and years of childhood memory.
When classes resumed months later, the children had a school again — but not the one they remembered. Friends were missing. Familiar surroundings were gone. The laughter that once filled the corridors was buried alongside students who never returned.
That was when the teachers realised they were not simply reopening a school. They were helping children rebuild a childhood that a disaster had shattered.
When Learning Had to Wait
The Meppadi school today has 331 students and 28 teachers. But in the weeks after the landslide, when the school community was still grappling with loss and displacement, the staff knew that returning to textbooks could not be the first priority.
Ninety-seven students from Classes 1 to 10 had been directly affected by the landslide — either injured, displaced, or bereaved — split almost evenly between girls and boys. Others had lost relatives or friends, including classmates who sat beside them every day. For the first month, the school itself was pressed into service as a relief camp. With the original campus destroyed, students were relocated to the kitchen and dining hall of another school compound.
For two months, academics were set aside entirely. Instead, the teachers focused on one thing: keeping the children together, and giving them a routine. Students arrived in the morning, ate breakfast and lunch, took part in activities, had evening snacks, and stayed through the day.
“We did not give the students a chance to overthink anything,” Unnikrishnan, a teacher who has worked at the school for 20 years, told EdPublica.
But even with the children physically back together, something was missing. “Both children and teachers have a sense of sadness regarding the disaster,” the headmistress Jesna Jose told EdPublica. “Even though they don’t show it often, we can feel it.” The children were together again. The school did not yet sound like itself.
Then Came the Smile
The change began with something that had nothing to do with textbooks.
Two teachers from a government school in Pathanamthitta, a district in south-central Kerala—Manoj Sini and K.S. Binu—arrived at Vellarmala dressed as clowns. They walked into a Class 1 classroom, played music, and began performing comic routines. The children laughed. Then the teachers laughed too.
“All of a sudden, the children started laughing. Seeing the children laugh, the teachers also started laughing,” Unnikrishnan recalls. It was a small moment. But after months of grief, it meant something far larger.
“That’s when we understood that art was the medicine,” he says.
The insight that followed was a quiet but important one: recovery did not have to begin with talking about the disaster. Sometimes, it could begin with giving children a reason to laugh.
“Once there was a smile, we could carry things forward. That was the turning point in rebuilding the school.”
Finding What Each Child Could Do
From there, the teachers began looking beyond what the children had lost and toward what they still had to rebuild the childhood.
They individually studied the 97 directly affected students to identify their interests and abilities. Some were drawn to craft, others to computers, art, sport, or science. Children were grouped by interest, and outside experts were brought in to train them — many arriving without any fee, through the teachers’ own personal networks and friendships.
The school became, for a period, a working studio of drama, oppana (a traditional Muslim wedding dance performed by women), nadan pattu (Kerala folk songs) and vanjippattu (traditional boat songs). A science expert ran demonstrations. A craft teacher introduced bookbinding and art. Students were entered into science exhibitions and arts festivals.
This was not simply keeping children occupied. It was giving them a structured way to discover themselves again — and it is the detail that separates what happened at Vellarmala from a generic “art therapy helped” narrative: the intervention was individually mapped, expert-led, and sustained, not a single feel-good workshop.
The results reached a public stage. Students from the school delivered the first dance programme at the State School Art Festival, and later performed Vellapokkathil (In the Flood) at the Kerala State School Youth Festival 2024 — all seven performers survivors of the Chooralmala landslide themselves.
Based on a story by the Malayalam writer Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, the play depicts communities and animals caught in a catastrophic flood. For the students performing it, the story was inseparable from what they had lived through months earlier — making the performance both intensely personal and difficult to watch as fiction.
Where Research Meets the Ground
What the Vellarmala teachers arrived at through instinct and trial finds independent confirmation in a study published in 2025 in the journal Development in Practice. Researcher V. Akhila and colleagues, drawing on direct involvement in the relief camps set up after the landslide, documented the same emotional terrain the teachers describe: survivors carrying acute guilt at having lived when neighbours and family did not, a disruption to “sense of security, identity, and hope,” and heightened anxiety, sleep disturbance and fear that did not resolve quickly.
The study examines the toll on first responders, many of whom were themselves survivors or had lost people they knew, and who were frequently deployed into relief work without any prior debriefing — carrying the emotional weight of that period into their daily lives long afterward. It is a reminder that “recovery” in a disaster zone is not a category that applies only to the visibly affected; it extends to everyone who worked to hold the response together, including, arguably, teachers like Unnikrishnan.
The researchers also flag something the Vellarmala experience illustrates directly: that mental health impacts fall unevenly across a population — hitting children, older residents, people with disabilities, and those relocated from outside the immediate community hardest — and that longer-term psychological support after landslides remains patchy and poorly coordinated almost everywhere it has been studied.
When Grief Returned
But there is no single fix for what these students had endured. The return of laughter did not mean the children had forgotten what happened.
As the SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate, Kerala’s Grade 10 board examination) approached, seven students — three girls and four boys — told their teachers they did not want to sit the exam. Many of the friends who should have been sitting beside them had died in the landslide, and the exam hall itself was a reminder of who was missing.
The teachers went to each of the seven students’ homes and persuaded them, one by one, to take the examination. They did. The school went on to record a 100 percent pass rate. At the farewell ceremony that followed, many students cried uncontrollably.
The episode is the clearest evidence that recovery here was never a straight line. There could be laughter one day and grief returning without warning the next. What the teachers had learned by then was not to expect children to simply “move on.” They stayed present through the difficult moments, and kept building spaces where students could learn, participate and be heard.
“Teachers gave them 24-hour support,” Unnikrishnan says. “It was survival. It was also a challenge for the teachers.”
Children and Disasters: A Global Problem
What happened at Chooralmala is a single, closely observed instance of a far larger pattern. UNICEF’s most recent global analysis found that at least 242 million students across 85 countries and territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events in a single year — 2024 — through heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods and droughts. At least one in seven students worldwide experienced some form of climate-linked disruption to their education that year.
South Asia was the worst-affected region, with 128 million students facing climate-related school disruption in 2024 alone; heatwaves by themselves affected an estimated 171 million students globally. The disruption is rarely confined to missed classes. Extreme heat and other hazards damage school infrastructure, make the route to school unsafe, and measurably affect children’s concentration, memory and physical and mental health — the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of harm.
The scale behind these numbers is worth sitting with. A 2024 narrative review co-authored by researchers at the World Health Organization, synthesising over a decade of peer-reviewed evidence on climate change and child health, notes that 2022 alone saw 387 climate-related disasters worldwide — storms, floods, wildfires and droughts — that killed more than 30,000 people.
The review’s consistent finding across the literature it examined is that these events measurably affect children’s mental and physical health, nutrition, safety, learning, and the caregiving relationships that hold a childhood together — precisely the five domains Vellarmala’s teachers found themselves rebuilding one at a time.
Speaking to EdPublica, Dr Kavitha G. Bhaskaran, a guest faculty member in the Department of Psychology and Disaster Management at Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, said children exposed to recurrent landslides can experience withdrawal, fear, nightmares and a loss of interest in activities they once enjoyed, along with a lasting fear of loud sounds, rain or even the night itself.
Dr Upasona Ghosh, Technical Expert–Climate Change and Health at the Centre for Environmental Health and a member of the WHO South-East Asia Regional Expert Group on Environmental Determinants of Health and Climate Change, told EdPublica she has observed the same patterns working with children in the Indian Sundarbans, where communities face recurrent flooding. In that setting, children were simply given colours and notebooks and asked to draw their fear — no explanation required. They could draw the sea, the floodwater, or the destruction they had witnessed, without needing the vocabulary to describe it. “The entire page might be black,” Ghosh says. “That could reflect the state of their mind.”
Ghosh also points out that the damage does not stop with the child. When a disaster disrupts a parent’s livelihood, access to healthcare and the ability to seek care for a child both suffer. Children can simultaneously lose access to school-based nutrition, health and hygiene programmes when education itself is disrupted — and they lose something harder to name. “Their school, friends, teachers and other people in their village form an important part of their social world,” she says. When that world is disrupted, recovery requires far more than reopening a classroom door.
Two Other Disasters, Two Other Answers
Wayanad is not the first place to confront this problem, and the responses elsewhere are instructive — both for what worked and for what the Vellarmala teachers had to invent on their own because it did not yet exist as institutional practice.
After Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) devastated the central Philippines in November 2013 — one of the strongest tropical storms ever recorded, affecting some 16 million people — the country’s Department of Education partnered with UNESCO and the Psychological Association of the Philippines to produce a formal teachers’ manual on psychosocial intervention for disaster-affected students.
The underlying premise mirrors exactly what Unnikrishnan and his colleagues discovered through trial and error: that teachers, positioned closest to children day after day, are often better placed than outside specialists to help a child begin processing trauma. In the immediate aftermath, volunteers in Cebu were running storytelling and “bibliotherapy” sessions with children in evacuation centres even before the typhoon made landfall — art and story as a first response, not an afterthought, much as the clown routine became at Vellarmala.
Nepal’s 2015 earthquake response took a more structural approach to a problem the Wayanad school solved through personal goodwill. Finn Church Aid and its Nepali partner CMC-Nepal built a peer-support network for teachers across 61 schools, training “psychosocial focal teachers” who could escalate serious cases to specialists in Kathmandu.
A needs assessment following the earthquake found more than 60 percent of affected children suffering sleep problems, alongside bullying, anxiousness and bedwetting — a set of symptoms that closely tracks what Bhaskaran describes seeing in Wayanad. What Nepal built was, in effect, an institutionalised version of what Vellarmala improvised: a formal mechanism for identifying which children need more than a routine and a smile, and where to send them.
The comparison is worth sitting with honestly rather than folding into the uplift: the expert network the Vellarmala teachers built by calling in personal favours was remarkable, but it was also contingent — a product of one community’s specific relationships and one headmaster’s persistence. Nepal’s model suggests what it might look like scaled and made durable rather than dependent on individual goodwill.
The Losses That Cannot Be Counted
There is a reason the language around this issue keeps reaching for something beyond the vocabulary of disaster economics. A damage assessment can price a destroyed school building, a washed-out road, a flattened home. It is far harder to price a child’s lost friendship, a familiar playground, or the emotional security that came from an intact community.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a formal category for this: non-economic loss and damage (NELD) — harm that resists financial quantification, spanning loss of life and health to the erosion of territory, cultural heritage, and social and cultural identity.
For children, these losses are acutely personal. Harjeet Singh, climate activist and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, told EdPublica that the destruction of a school should never be filed simply under lost infrastructure. “For children, a school is a sanctuary, a site of identity, and an ecosystem of emotional safety,” he says. What a disaster like Wayanad’s takes, in his framing, includes shattered social bonds and the sudden disappearance of the developmental environment a child grew up inside — which is why, he argues, recovery cannot stop at concrete and steel. “Recovery cannot just be about pouring concrete,” Singh says. “It must be about restoring the social fabric.”
This is no longer only a conceptual argument. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, operational under the UNFCCC since 2022 and hosted in the Philippines with the World Bank as its interim trustee, holds close to $488 million, with a first round of disbursements — roughly $250 million — scheduled to begin rolling out in 2025 and 2026. Mental health and psychosocial support is explicitly listed among the categories countries can submit project proposals for, alongside cultural heritage preservation and dignified relocation.
In principle, this means the kind of psychosocial infrastructure Nepal built with international NGO funding after 2015 — and the kind Vellarmala’s teachers had to invent themselves in 2024 — now has a formal funding channel it could be built through, if Kerala or the Government of India chose to apply.
What India’s Own Guidelines Say
India is not without a policy framework for exactly this problem — which makes the Vellarmala story more pointed, not less. The National Disaster Management Authority, working with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences’ Rahbar programme, updated its National Disaster Management Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services in Disasters in 2023, setting out a trauma-informed, whole-of-society approach meant to be built into every stage of the disaster management cycle, not bolted on afterward.
Alongside it sits the older National School Safety Policy Guidelines of 2016, which task School Management Committees and a designated “Safety Focal Point Teacher” in each school with disaster preparedness — including, on paper, psychosocial elements, though the bulk of that programme’s implementation history runs toward physical safety: building codes, mock drills, evacuation plans.
Two things are worth sitting with here. First, the guidelines exist — India is not starting from zero the way some of its neighbours were in 2015. Second, none of what the guidelines describe appears to have reached Vellarmala in July 2024. What the teachers built — the interest-mapping, the expert network, the sustained follow-through into exam season — was invented on the ground, by people with no formal psychosocial training, drawing on personal contacts rather than a state or district implementation plan.
That gap between the guideline and the ground is, in its own way, the story: India has written down roughly what Nepal built through international NGO funding, but writing it down and delivering it to a village school in Meppadi panchayat during the actual emergency turned out to be two very different things.
What This Adds Up To
Set side by side, Wayanad, Tacloban and the villages of rural Nepal point toward the same conclusion from three different directions: formal mental health infrastructure for children after a climate disaster is, almost everywhere, arriving late, underfunded, or not at all — and the gap is being filled, when it is filled, by whoever is standing closest to the child. Sometimes that is a trained peer-support teacher network built with international funding. Sometimes it is two teachers in clown costumes who happened to believe art might help.
Both approaches worked, to a point. But only one of them is replicable on demand, in a district that doesn’t happen to have a headmaster with the right personal contacts. That is the uncomfortable finding underneath the uplifting parts of this story: what saved Vellarmala’s children was extraordinary improvisation under pressure, not policy — and extraordinary improvisation is, by definition, not something the next disaster-hit school can count on.
Rebuilding a Childhood
Chooralmala’s teachers never had the power to restore everything the landslide took. They could not bring back the children who died. They could not recreate the old school, or return the community to what it was before July 30, 2024.
What they did was give children back a routine when their lives had been upended. They found each child’s individual talent when grief had become the only story anyone was telling about them. They brought artists, scientists and experts into children’s lives who would otherwise never have crossed paths with a village school in Wayanad. They encouraged children to dance, sing, perform, experiment and compete — and when children struggled, as the SSLC refusals showed they still would, the teachers stayed rather than declaring the recovery finished.
What Chooralmala’s teachers proved is not that children are resilient. That word is used too easily after disasters, as though recovery is something that simply happens with time. It isn’t. Resilience had to be built—patiently, deliberately, by teachers who chose to replace silence with music, grief with art, isolation with friendship, and fear with purpose.
The tragedy is that none of this should have depended on extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. By the time the next flood, landslide or cyclone tears through another school, children should not have to wait for a headmaster with the right contacts or two teachers willing to arrive dressed as clowns. They should find a system that already knows how to help them heal.
Climate change is making disasters more frequent, putting schools in the path of floods, landslides and storms. When classrooms disappear, books are lost and playgrounds are buried, rebuilding the school is only the beginning. The harder task is helping children rebuild the sense of safety, routine and childhood that the disaster took from them.
Climate
India Doesn’t Need More Climate Awareness. It Needs Climate Agency
India’s climate conversation is shifting from awareness to action. Climate communication researcher Jagadish Thaker explains why growing concern about climate change must translate into agency, skills, employment and meaningful participation in the clean-energy transition.
India may not have a climate-awareness problem. It may have an action and agency problem. That is one of the central questions emerging from the work of Dr. Jagadish Thaker, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland and a Principal Investigator on the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s research on public attitudes towards climate change in India.
Thaker studies how people understand climate change, how media and communication shape public opinion, and what turns concern into action. His recent work has provided one of the most detailed pictures yet of how Indians perceive climate change and the country’s clean-energy transition.
The latest Climate Change in the Indian Mind survey, conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and CVoter, interviewed 5,427 Indian adults between December 2025 and February 2026. It found that 88% of Indians are worried about global warming and 84% say they have personally experienced its effects. At the same time, 50% say they know little or nothing about global warming, while 84% believe it is happening.
For Thaker, that apparent contradiction is important. People may not always use the language of climate science, but their experiences of heat, floods, changing rainfall and other environmental changes are shaping how they understand the issue.
The findings also point towards a larger challenge: how can climate communication help people move from recognising the problem to participating in solutions?
In this conversation with EdPublica, Thaker discusses what India’s changing climate attitudes reveal about public understanding, why extreme weather can be a powerful entry point for climate communication, and why climate education should connect climate action with jobs, skills, innovation and community participation.
“The challenge now is turning concern into sustained engagement and effective action”
Climate communication has traditionally focused on raising awareness. But your latest survey suggests Indians are already deeply concerned about climate change. What should the next phase of climate communication look like?
The first communication challenge is understanding how much Indians know about the causes and consequences of climate change. Our findings indicate that awareness is low, but a brief explanation is all that is required for Indians to connect their experience with extreme weather events to climate change. So, we must help people make sense of the scientifically accurate causes and consequences, so Indians understand that the problem is not rooted in local issues alone but is also a global issue.
The second communication challenge is to move beyond awareness and focus more on efficacy, agency and solutions. People need credible information about what governments, businesses, communities and households can do, how clean-energy transitions create jobs and improve air quality, and how local actions connect to larger climate goals.
In short, the next generation of climate communication should help people see not only the problem, but also realistic pathways towards solutions and resilience.
The biggest communication story in this survey is not that Indians are unaware of climate change. It is that many Indians who know little about the term ‘global warming’ nevertheless recognise environmental changes around them, report experiencing climate impacts personally, and strongly support climate and energy solutions.
The challenge now is turning concern into sustained engagement and effective action. Extreme weather may be changing how Indians understand climate change
Dr. Jagadish Thaker, Public concern about climate change has risen over the past decade. What do you think has changed?
According to a recent study between 1995 and 2024, Indians faced 430 extreme weather events, including cyclones, floods and severe heat waves, which resulted in around 80,000 deaths and USD 170 billion in economic losses.
The India Meteorological Department has also reported that India recorded its eighth-warmest year on record in 2025. These experiences matter because people often understand climate change through what they experience in their daily lives. Extreme heat, changing rainfall, floods and droughts can make an otherwise abstract global issue much more tangible.
“Climate education should not focus only on risks”
Ninety-five percent of Indians support renewable-energy training for women and youth. How important is climate education in schools and communities?
The support is remarkable. Ninety-five percent favour a national programme prioritising training youth and women for renewable-energy jobs, and 93% support renewable-energy job training more generally.
These findings suggest that climate communication should not focus only on risks. Indians appear highly interested in solutions, skills and opportunities.
Effective climate education can help people understand climate change, but it can also help them see pathways to participate in the transition through employment, innovation and community action. Education is most powerful when it links climate action to everyday benefits and opportunities. Public support may not be the biggest barrier to India’s energy transition
Most Indians support replacing coal with solar and wind. But coal remains central to India’s electricity system. Why is it difficult to bring about behavioural change and effective public policy even when public opinion is this strong?
Public opinion is an important factor shaping energy systems. Infrastructure investments, energy security concerns, employment, institutional capacity and economic considerations all influence policy outcomes.
There are also ongoing challenges around technology upgrades and funding for major changes across the economy and country.
What is striking in our data is how consistently supportive Indians are of the energy transition. These findings suggest that public opinion may be less of a barrier to climate and energy policy than is often assumed.
For communicators, one challenge is helping people understand how long-term energy transitions actually occur and what role citizens can play in them.
Nearly one in three Indians say they have already moved or considered moving because of climate-related disasters. What does this reveal about how climate change is reshaping everyday life?
Twenty-eight percent of Indians report that they have either already moved (11% ) or considered moving (18%) because of weather-related disasters such as extreme heat, droughts, flooding or sea-level rise. Climate change is already influencing decisions about where people live
From a communication perspective, these findings suggest that climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is increasingly affecting decisions about livelihoods, homes and community stability.
“Indians perceive climate change as a present-day reality”
India is among the world’s largest carbon emitters, yet its per-capita emissions remain far below those of most developed countries while it also faces significant climate impacts. How should we understand this imbalance?
Questions about responsibility and equity extend beyond the scope of this public-opinion survey.
What our findings show is that Indians perceive climate change as a present-day reality. Fifty-seven percent say people in India are already being harmed by global warming, 84% say global warming will harm people in India, and 85% say it will harm future generations.
Regardless of broader debates about responsibility, climate change is widely viewed by Indians as a significant and immediate challenge, and there is strong support for the government to pursue ambitious action plans on climate change and the clean-energy transition.
Your survey covers one of the world’s most diverse populations across 12 languages. What important regional differences lie beneath the national averages?
Absolutely. National averages are useful, but they never tell the entire story. India is extraordinarily diverse geographically, culturally, economically and politically. Many climate attitudes vary across regions and populations. India’s national averages hide significant regional differences.
Readers interested in these differences should explore the Yale Climate Opinion Maps for India, which provide state- and district-level estimates of climate beliefs, risk perceptions and policy support.
Those maps reveal substantial geographic variation that national averages can conceal, while also showing that concern about climate change and support for many climate policies are widespread across much of the country.
If this survey were conducted after an even more intense summer, would public concern rise further, or have we already reached a ceiling?
We cannot know without collecting the data. Public opinion often responds to highly visible and personally experienced events. However, concern is already extremely high in this survey. Ninety-two percent say global warming is at least somewhat important to them personally.
One interesting question for future research is how extreme weather events affect not just concern, but support for specific adaptation and mitigation policies.
Climate
Western Himalaya Heating Faster Than East, Study Finds; Snow Loss Could Surge
A new study finds the western Himalaya is warming faster than the central and eastern regions, with major losses in spring snow projected by 2100.
Western Himalaya warming is accelerating faster than in the central and eastern Himalayas, with the region projected to face the greatest snow loss by 2100, a new climate study finds.
A new study combining 120 years of observed temperature records (1901–2020) with eight global climate models finds that the western Himalaya (Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh) is heating up more quickly than the central and eastern stretches of the range — a pattern that holds across every season and every emission scenario the researchers tested.
The imbalance shows up in multiple ways: winters are warming faster than springs, nights are warming faster than days, and by the end of the century, the western Himalaya stands to lose far more of its spring snow cover than the rest of the range, with the gap between low- and high-emission futures widening sharply the longer emissions stay high.
Western Himalaya warming is accelerating across seasons
A research study, Vulnerability of the Himalayan region under the climate change, published in the Journal of Earth System Science, led by the Department of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics, Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Mesra, Ranchi, with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and Ashoka University, assessed how temperature and snow are changing across three sectors of the Indian Himalayan range, and how far that change could go by 2100.
The researchers drew on two sources of evidence: 120 years of recorded ground-station temperatures across the region, from 1901 to 2020, and eight global climate models that were first validated against that historical record and then projected forward to the year 2100 under five emissions scenarios, ranging from steep near-term cuts to continued high fossil-fuel use. Two seasons were examined: winter, when snow accumulates, and the pre-monsoon spring months, when it melts.
The range is split into three stretches, studied separately: the western Himalaya (Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Himachal Pradesh), the central Himalaya (largely Uttarakhand), and the eastern Himalaya (Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, and the wider North-East). Between them, they hold more than 15,000 glaciers and feed the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the rivers that roughly 1.5 billion people depend on.
The warming has already reached about 1°C, and it is not evenly spread
Compared with the first three decades of the 1900s, all three stretches of the range had already warmed by close to 1°C in winter by the two decades to 2014: 1.06°C in the western Himalaya, 0.96°C in the central Himalaya and 1.09°C in the east. Springs had warmed by 1.08°C in the west, and 0.83°C in the centre and east. The warming has not arrived at a steady pace. Warmer-than-normal years have become the rule rather than the exception across all three stretches over the past 20–30 years, most of the change has come recently, the study said.
“The Himalaya is often discussed as a single system, but our observations and models both say otherwise. The western Himalaya consistently emerges as the most sensitive stretch — it warms the most and loses the most snow under every pathway we tested. That has direct consequences for the states that sit in it,” said Protyusha Mukhopadhyay, lead author, Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Mesra.
Under high emissions, western Himalayan winters may warm by more than 7°C
The models show the same west-to-east pattern throughout the century. If emissions stay high, winters by 2081–2100 would be 7.18°C warmer in the western Himalaya, 6.71°C warmer in the central Himalaya and 5.82°C warmer in the east, compared with the early 1900s. Springs warm in the same order: 6.91°C, 6.41°C and 5.16°C.
Himalayan Warming: Key Findings
- 1.06°C — winter warming in the western Himalaya already observed
- 7.18°C — projected winter warming in the western Himalaya by 2081–2100 under high emissions
- 95.9 kg/m² — projected western Himalayan spring snow loss under the highest-emission pathway
- 32 kg/m² — projected spring snow loss even under the lowest-emission pathway by the end of the century
- 1.23°C — rise in western Himalayan winter night-time temperatures
- 1.5 billion — approximate number of people dependent on rivers fed by the Himalayan region
“In the west and centre, winters are warming faster than springs. Less snow on the ground would mean a darker surface, which absorbs more heat, which melts more snow. It matters because winter is the season in which snow is supposed to build up; warmer winters mean less snow banked for the melt months that follow,” said Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, corresponding author, Ashoka University.
Nights are warming faster than days
One of the clearest signals in the observational record is that minimum (night-time) temperatures are rising faster than maximum (daytime) temperatures across the western and central Himalaya. In the western Himalaya, winter minimum temperatures rose 1.23°C against 0.87°C for day temperatures; in spring, 1.25°C against 0.91°C. In the central Himalaya the gap is wider still in winter (1.20°C against 0.72°C).
The eastern Himalaya is the exception, where winter maximum temperatures rose more (1.19°C) than minimum (0.99°C). Warmer nights matter because they shorten the hours in which snow and ice can refreeze. That speeds up melting, and changes when the meltwater reaches the rivers below.
“Rising night-time temperatures are the quieter half of this story, and arguably the more consequential one. When the cold nights that let snowpack recover start disappearing, you change the melt cycle itself rather than how much snow falls, but when the water arrives downstream,” said Dr Swagata Payra, co-author, BIT Mesra.
Spring is where the snow is being lost
Across all three stretches of the range, spring sees greater snow loss than winter, and the western Himalaya loses by far the most. The study measures this as the weight of snow sitting on each square metre of ground. Over the western Himalaya, spring snow falls away steadily even on the lowest-emission path: by 24.2 kg per square metre by 2040, 27.4 kg by 2060 and 32 kg by the end of the century. On the highest-emission path, that end-of-century loss reaches 95.9 kg per square metre, enough to point towards an almost complete loss of seasonal snow in some pockets of the region, the authors said.
The central Himalaya loses less, though still a substantial amount: between 17.0 and 34.9 kg per square metre by the end of the century, depending on the emissions path. The eastern Himalaya loses the least, between 5.5 and 11.1 kg. Winter follows the same pattern. Western Himalayan snow loss by the end of the century ranges from 9.5 kg per square metre on the lowest-emission path to 53.2 kg on the highest.
The gap between emission pathways
Western Himalayan winters end the century 2.55°C warmer if emissions fall sharply, or 7.18°C warmer if they do not (a gap of 4.6°C). By 2100, a high-emission trajectory would strip roughly three times more spring snow from the region than a low-emission one, and more than five times more winter snow. The eight models largely agree on the next two to three decades. They diverge much more towards 2100 because how much the region warms by then depends on choices that have not yet been made.
“The models agree on where we are headed over the next two to three decades. What remains open is the second half of the century, and that is determined by emissions rather than by anything intrinsic to the mountains. A low-emission pathway does not stop the warming, but it changes its magnitude by several degrees,” said Mukhopadhyay
The eastern Himalaya warms the least of the three and loses the least snow, and its outlook varies the least across the emission paths. However, the study notes that the east has become a hotspot for glacial lake outburst floods that are sudden, destructive floods released when a lake dammed by glacial debris gives way. “That risk is expected to spread westward in the future, driven by retreating glaciers and the new lakes they leave behind, not by temperature alone,” said Protyusha.
The authors call for region-specific climate services and adaptation policy; enhanced monitoring that combines in-situ networks, satellite products and sustained high-resolution modelling to track glacier and snow dynamics in near real time; strengthened early-warning systems; sustainable water management; community-level resilience programmes; and transboundary cooperation. How water actually moves through these high mountains is still poorly captured by models, and more measurement on the ground is needed before it can be said with confidence how much ice and snow melts each year, and how much of that reaches the rivers below, the authors said.
Climate
Record Drought and Extreme Heat Push European Rivers to Lows as Wildfires Spread North
The European drought is driving rivers to record lows as extreme heat, wildfires, crop losses and water shortages put Europe’s energy and transport systems under pressure.
A prolonged European drought combined with extreme heat is pushing major rivers to record lows, disrupting shipping and energy production while worsening crop losses and wildfire risks. As dry conditions spread north, Europe’s water, agriculture, ecosystems and public health systems are coming under increasing pressure.
A long period of low rainfall combined with extreme heatwaves has placed half of the European Union and the United Kingdom under drought conditions. A report published on August 12 by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the European Drought Observatory reveals that nine percent of the region reached a critical alert level by late July.
Satellite data from Copernicus, the Earth monitoring program of the European Union, shows that severely dry soil is now damaging crops and plants across the continent. In its latest assessment, the observatory warned that “the drought has built up since early spring due to lower rainfall and higher than average temperatures, turning into fuel for devastating wildfires.”
European Drought Reaches Across the Continent
The lack of rain has driven four of Europe’s largest rivers—the Rhine, Danube, Loire, and Po—to dangerously low levels. Near Cologne, Germany, the Rhine fell to a fresh record low of 49 centimetres by mid-August, according to the Rhine Waterways and Shipping Authority — nearly 20 centimetres below the previous record of 68 centimetres set earlier in the summer, which had itself broken the prior all-time low recorded in 2018. Because large cargo boats need deeper water to float safely, operators have been forced to carry much lighter loads to avoid getting stuck on the riverbed, and in places river traffic has largely halted. Carrying smaller loads requires more trips, creating major shipping delays for important industrial materials across central Europe.
At the same time, low water levels and rising temperatures are creating a serious energy crisis across the continent. In France, power companies had to cut back nuclear energy production because river water became too warm to safely cool reactors without harming aquatic life. Hydroelectric power generation has also plunged across the Alps, northern Italy, and central-eastern Europe. Copernicus analysts noted that low river flows on the Danube are creating “serious operational challenges” for power plant cooling. In Italy’s Po Valley, the dried-out river basin has triggered a separate disaster: saltwater from the Adriatic Sea has flowed inland into depleted channels, ruining farmland soil and cutting off freshwater supplies for local crops.
Wildfires Burn Over 550,000 Hectares Across Europe
Dry plants and extreme heat have triggered widespread wildfires across the continent. According to August 11 data from the European Forest Fire Information System, 552,437 hectares of land have burned within the European Union since the start of the year, spread across 1,614 individual fires of 30 hectares or larger. Although this total remains below the 667,342 hectares burned by the same date in 2025 — a season that went on to become the worst on record for EU wildfires, with 1,034,552 hectares burned in total — it is significantly higher than the 20-year historical average.
Recent satellite data shows a clear shift: large wildfires are no longer staying just in southern hotspots like Spain and Greece. As dry weather pushes northward, fire risks are expanding into cooler regions, including northwestern France, southern Great Britain, the Alps, and the Balkans. Experts at the Joint Research Centre emphasized that “wildfire risk is no longer confined to southern Europe but is increasingly affecting wider parts of the continent under prolonged hot and dry conditions.”
Declining Harvests and Rising Health Risks
Continued heat and dry soil are dealing a heavy blow to European farmers. According to assessments by the European Joint Research Centre, crop yields across central and eastern Europe have dropped significantly. Production estimates for key spring and summer crops, such as grain maize and sunflowers, have fallen by six to seven percent. Winter crops have also suffered, with yield forecasts declining between one and four percent compared to earlier projections.
High temperatures are having a severe impact on human health as well. Monitoring data from public health agencies and the World Health Organization reveals a sharp surge in heat-related emergency admissions and deaths during extreme temperature episodes. Data compiled from national health agencies — including Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, which alone recorded an estimated 11,900 heat-linked deaths — put the region’s heat-related death toll above 25,000 as of early August, highlighting the severe human cost of this summer’s weather.
Seasonal Outlook and Emergency Response
Weather predictions indicate that dry conditions will continue through early autumn. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, drier and warmer weather is expected to persist across central-western Europe and southern Scandinavia through September. Climate experts also warn that a developing El Nino pattern could keep global temperatures higher than normal well into spring 2027. “Water resources, crops, energy systems, river transport, and ecosystems are all under growing pressure,” the report warned, with heatwave risks remaining high through August.
To coordinate emergency aid, the European Union activated its Civil Protection Mechanism. A dedicated fleet of 22 firefighting aircraft, 5 helicopters, and ground teams have been placed on standby across 12 countries. Meanwhile, the Copernicus satellite service has responded to more than 30 emergency requests since June, providing real-time mapping data to help local authorities track active fires and assess land damage on the ground.
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