Nepal-Tibet floods: when disaster strikes before communities recover from previous climate extremes, crisis escalates

Flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border have killed at least ninety-five people, left more than three hundred eighty tourists missing, and affected fifty thousand residents, according to The Conversation (UK). The region hadn't yet recovered from a 2025 flood on the same river that killed nine and destroyed a bridge linking Nepal and China. Writing for The Conversation, UCL's Mark Maslin points to this alongside Sri Lanka's recent floods, which struck communities still rebuilding from a cyclone just nine months earlier, as evidence that disaster recovery time, not just severity, needs to be measured and planned for. As he notes, the next disaster doesn't start from zero — it inherits what the last one left behind.

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