Nepal: In the shadow of a glacier

Crossing Continents

The episode explores the existential threat posed by climate change to the remote Himalayan village of Halji, Nepal. It details how melting

Key takeaways

• The village of Halji faces imminent threats from glacial lake outbursts and landslides due to rising temperatures.
• Nepal's mountains have lost one-third of their ice in just over 30 years.
• The Rinchen Ling monastery, a 1,000-year-old cultural treasure, is at risk of destruction by natural disasters.
• Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya provide water for nearly 2 billion people downstream.
• Recent floods in Rasuwa caused massive destruction and left thousands of people missing.

Main topics

• Climate change in Nepal
• Glacial melting
• Himalayan cultural heritage

Notable quotes

Climate change... is a thing of the future. But here in Nepal, it is a thing of now.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a poignant reminder that for Himalayan communiti

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 2 (0:06) Is Facebook dying? I'm Tristan Redmond, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. More than 15 years after the social network, a new movie on the inner workings of Facebook hit cinemas in October. The journalist who's reporting Inspire the film tells us why Facebook stopped being cool and whether Meta, its parent company, can reinvent itself. For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your pods. Speaker 1 (0:44) This is one of the remotest corners of Nepal, right on the country's northwestern border with Tibet. It's taken four days to get here from Kathmandu, and today I've been driven for eight hours along rough, rocky tracks, through deep river valleys framed by towering Himalayan peaks and over a literally breathtaking 5,000-metre pass. I'm now on the Nepalese part of the Tibetan plateau, the roof of the world. Speaker 1 (1:15) Just passing a herd of about ten yaks. A few of them are galloping past us with their shaggy tails stuck straight in the air. They've got these magnificent horns, big muscular creatures. Speaker 1 (1:30) I'm on my way to the village of Halji, an isolated mountain community that's home to one of Nepal's oldest Buddhist monasteries. But the reason I'm going is because the village faces an existential threat from a melting glacier, something that's never felt more relevant given the devastating floods that happened to the east of here just a week ago. Speaker 1 (1:53) Now, whilst the scale of those floods was unprecedented, rising temperatures are destabilising the landscape across the high mountains of Asia. So what's the future for Himalayan communities like Haldi? I'm Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent, and welcome to Crossing Continents. Speaker 6 (2:27) When Speaker 4 (2:27) the flood came in 2011, it was big, very big. We were really scared. Houses were swept away. Two of them were taken by the flood just down there. There were also five or six water mills along this river where we would grind barley, and they were swept away too. And the water came very close to the monastery. Everyone was terrified. Thank God the flood came during the day. If it had come during the night, I'm not sure what would have happened. Speaker 7 (2:57) Paljo Tamang, a slight man of about 50, is the ward chair and headman of Halji, one of the three villages in the Limi Valley. He's standing beside the fast-flowing Halji River, which plunges down a steep-walled valley right past the village's 70 or so rough stone houses. There's no escape from nature here. Halji sits in a small green valley collared by forbidding 5,000-metre peaks, their flanks raked by landslides. And at the far end of the valley, past fields dotted with pink and white wildflowers, the Hauji joins the larger Humla-Karnali River. As a boy, Paljo remembers being able to see a glacier in the mountains just above the village, but now it's disappeared from view. And the more the glaciers melted, the more frequent the floods have become. Speaker 6 (3:50) When Speaker 4 (3:50) the big floods came for the first time, I went up the mountain myself with two other guys to see what might be causing it. We were quite daring. We were young then. We followed the flooding river up the mountain, looking for the source. It was really tough. We knew we could die if we slipped and were taken by the river, but we were able to get to the top and take a few photos. We found there were a cluster of lakes up there, glacial lakes. And when these lakes overflow or when they burst, then the river floods. It becomes a torrent of water and rock. There's no Speaker 7 (4:24) flood warning system for communities in the Limi Valley, but after the first big floods in 2011, the village got some funding from an NGO to build walls along the banks of the river. It's helped, but everyone knows they're still in a precarious position. Not only are the rivers swollen by glacial meltwater, but warming temperatures are also degrading the permafrost. which acts as a kind of glue, binding this landscape together. Speaker 6 (4:54) There's Speaker 4 (4:55) three things that could happen at any time. First, there are these massive boulders which you see there in the valley. They fall from this side of the mountain and could hit the village at any time. Then over there to the south, there's been recent landslides just beyond the school and the Karnali River. Now these landslides won't hit the village itself, but if one comes down and blocks the Karnali River, it will flood the valley. And three, there is the threat from these glacial lakes in the mountains that might cause a flood at any time. Over the years, I've gone to Kathmandu many times and I've told them we need to build more defences. But it's probably because we're very far away and don't have enough political power that people don't listen. So to live here is, in a way, to live in a state of constant fear. I'm very scared. But what can you do? Speaker 7 (5:48) In May 2025, a flash flood destroyed a number of houses in the neighbouring community of Till, and some families have since abandoned the village. I asked Pajal whether this and the recent floods in central Nepal have changed people's minds about staying here in Hauji. Speaker 4 (6:07) There is no immediate change in our thinking, but one day there could be a flood like that here. There's big glacial lakes up there. And the problem is, there's a bit of mountain overhanging the lake on the left. And I'm worried that parts of the mountain could collapse into the lake and trigger something like we saw in Rasur, where there's landslide and lots of debris, lots of water, ice and rock comes down. Speaker 1 (6:32) Given all these dangers, why do you stay? What keeps you in Halji? Speaker 4 (6:38) One is that we don't have the financial resources to move. And the second is the monastery. We rely on it. Because we don't get a lot of support from the state around here, if people get sick, need help, or even when there is a natural disaster, people just go and pray at the monastery. We believe that will save us. Speaker 7 (7:09) Dressed in maroon robes and a down jacket, a boyish-faced monk called Kunshok is performing a puja, or ritual, in a shrine room dedicated to the goddess Achi, the protector of the village and this monastery. Sitting cross-legged beside a large drum, he reads from an old Tibetan sutra, a Buddhist text written on rectangular leaves of parchment. To appease