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A weekly digest on impacts, politics and science of the climate emergency from the Global South perspective. You can find this digest in the web here.
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Dear readers,
Welcome to the Climate Weekly Digest by the Centre for Science and Environment’s Climate Change and Green Economy Programme and Down to Earth.
The latest devastating flood in Nepal’s Rasuwa region is raising concerns about a changing pattern of disasters across the Himalaya. Preliminary assessments suggest that the Bhote Koshi flood may not have been caused by extreme rainfall alone. Instead, an avalanche of rock and ice may have plunged into the river, temporarily blocked its flow and then released a destructive torrent of water, boulders and sediment. The event bears some similarities to the 2021 Rishiganga disaster in Uttarakhand and the 2025 Dharali disaster. In both cases, catastrophic debris flows occurred without rainfall intense enough to explain the scale of destruction. The emerging risk is therefore one that conventional flood planning may struggle to capture, i.e., cascading disasters triggered by unstable mountains, glaciers, landslides and temporary natural dams.
Climate change may not be the immediate trigger of every such event, but a warming Himalaya is altering the physical conditions in which these disasters develop. Retreating glaciers, expanding glacial lakes, unstable moraines and changing freeze-thaw cycles are creating new vulnerabilities.
The implications extend across borders. Rivers originating in the high Himalaya can carry the consequences of disasters across national boundaries, making regional monitoring, early-warning systems and information sharing increasingly critical.
Closer home, India’s April 2026 power surge captured the complexity of its transition - solar briefly met nearly a third of demand, but coal still supplied nearly two-thirds of generation as evening demand peaked. India’s rapid clean-energy expansion is thus reshaping its power system, but coal remains central to electricity generation, state revenues and millions of livelihoods. Experts argue that a successful transition must go beyond renewables to protect coal-dependent communities through economic diversification, worker support and stronger Centre-state planning.
Lastly, a new episode of CSE’s Carbon Politics podcast is finally out. In this episode, Avantika Goswami and Trishant Dev from the Climate Change and Green Economy Programme examine a central question for the global clean energy transition - can countries in the Global South build the clean technologies they need, or will they remain dependent on concentrated global supply chains? The episode explores the challenges and opportunities around building domestic clean-tech manufacturing capacity, and what this means for a transition that is to be equitable as well as ambitious.
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By -
Sehr Raheja
Climate Change and Green Economy, CSE
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Nepal, Rishiganga and Dharali are signals of a Himalayan crisis, 27 August 2026
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Global ocean records hottest day ever, 24 August 2026
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CLIMATE NEWS | SCIENCE| IMPACTS| POLITICS |
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Carbon Politics: A Video Podcast by CSE |
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| Cartoon |
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Online Training Course |
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