Just two weeks ago, on October 29, an outburst from Sintaphu Tsho, a moraine-dammed glacial lake in Bhutan’s Laya area, triggered flooding. The resulting glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) damaged roads, bridges and other public infrastructure in two districts of the tiny Himalayan kingdom. Two weeks earlier, on October 11, a landslide-induced flash flood struck communities in Nepal’s Chumnubri-Arughat region, along the Budhi Gandaki river, causing widespread destruction. On August 26, a massive ice-and-rock collapse on the northern slope of Tsangbu Ri, in the Lhende Khola valley in Nepal, triggered a catastrophic flash flood, killing about 2,000 people and destroying roads, bridges and hydropower projects; more than 5,000 are still missing.
India’s Himalayan villages have suffered similar disasters, repeatedly. The list includes the Kedarnath disaster of 2013, the Rishi Ganga disaster in Chamoli in 2021 and the Dharali disaster of 2025.
These are no longer isolated warnings from a climate-vulnerable region. Taken together, they provide more than a decade of increasingly compelling evidence of the need for sustained, anticipatory and risk-informed preparedness across the Himalayan countries. Why, then, does preparedness remain so inadequate despite the region’s well-established and exceptional vulnerability?
The question stayed with me as I attended a programme on the International Partnership for Early Warning Systems and Resilience to Climate-Driven Natural Hazards (IP4EWS), led by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI). The programme brought together scientists, policymakers and other stakeholders from India, Canada and Norway to advance scientific, technical and governance approaches to early warning for climate-driven natural hazards.
The timing could hardly have been more consequential. As participants examined Norway’s preparedness systems, the August 26 disaster in Nepal offered a devastating reminder of what happens when hazards outpace preparedness.
It also brought into sharp focus the contrast between the complacency of Himalayan countries and Norway’s institutional culture of preparedness—a contrast that deserves much closer scrutiny.
Norway's approach to forecasting, planning and preparedness is impressive. Its strength lies not in any single technology, but in investments sustained over decades in hazard knowledge, monitoring networks, institutional capacity, public awareness, evacuation planning, infrastructure and repeated exercises. Preparedness has become an institutional habit, perhaps one of the country's greatest strengths.
Similarly, scientific monitoring and modelling are not confined to research; they inform planning, public communication and operational decisions. Meteorological observations are systematically incorporated into hazard assessments. Weather data from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET) inform the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate’s (NVE's) assessments, supported by daily briefings between landslide forecasters, meteorologists and the community workers.
The SeNorge website is a particularly useful example of how integrated meteorological, snow and hydrological data can support operational forecasting, hazard monitoring and disaster preparedness (Picture 3). Its Yr-Varsom-Regobs ecosystem is an integrated, open-data network for weather forecasting, natural hazard warnings, and crowdsourced field observations, supported by the scientific and operational capabilities of NVE, MET and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA). It works as a two-way early warning system, where the public is not merely the recipient of warnings; it also becomes a source of real-time ground information that can improve the warning system.
Regobs is designed around the needs of someone observing a hazard in the field, rather than those of a scientist entering information into a technical database. Its features include simple reporting, GPS-enabled observations, a photo-first approach, options for basic or detailed submissions, support for multiple hazards, offline maps and the ability for several people to report the same event. It accommodates different levels of expertise and makes reporting a hazard almost as straightforward as observing one.
India is also moving towards crowd-sourced reporting through Bhooskhalan, while Geological Survey of India (GSI) continues to expand its rainfall-based regional landslide early-warning coverage. These are important advances. Yet India's systems remain distributed across GSI, India Meteorological Department, the National and State Disaster Management Authorities (NDMA and SDMAs), and other agencies. There is no fully integrated national system connecting the different stages of hazard observation, forecasting, warning dissemination and action. Coverage remains uneven across hazards and regions, while communication to the final user is often the weakest link.
During IP4EWS, we had the opportunity to examine Norway's approach to visualising warnings. Gridded datasets and high-resolution LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) topography are available online, enabling both professionals and members of the public to access and interpret relevant information. In a changing climate, with mountain hazards becoming increasingly complex, such an integrated chain of information and action could offer valuable lessons for Uttarakhand and the wider Himalayas, particularly in light of the August 26, 2026 Tsangbu Ri–Trishuli disaster in Nepal.
At Birtavarre, NVE has a 24-hour monitoring system for the highly unstable Jettan and Indre Nordnes rockslide sites. The Jettan landslide presents a major hazard because a collapse into the fjord could trigger a tsunami, affecting downstream settlements. Given the scale of the potential consequences, NVE has established a comprehensive, multi-parameter in-situ monitoring network to track long-term deformation and detect signs of rapid acceleration.
NVE continuously monitors 10 mountain sites, with another 23 subject to regular monitoring. The monitoring combines geological, geodetic and geophysical instruments to capture surface and subsurface changes. These include global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), laser measurements, tension rods (extensometers), satellite radar (SB-InSAR), borehole instruments (DMS), electronic levels, tiltmeters, inclinometers, meteorological stations, seismic sensors and high-resolution web cameras (Picture 4). The resulting information feeds into Norway's early-warning arrangements and supports timely evacuation when necessary.
Norway's systems operate at a smaller geographical scale than the disasters that regularly affect the Himalayas. But their underlying principles offer a foundation for wider application. Adapting them would require accounting for the region's distinctive challenges: extreme topographic variability, rapidly changing weather, cascading hazards, transboundary river systems, remote and inaccessible settlements, seasonal and transient populations and limited last-mile connectivity.
Perhaps the most important lesson from IP4EWS was the institutional culture of anticipation: recognising a hazard early, preparing for its consequences and acting before it becomes a disaster. Norway demonstrates what a genuinely proactive, rather than reactive, disaster-risk management system can look like, aimed to save even a single life.
Norway is the first country to develop a nationwide landslide early-warning system (LEWS), in 2013. The present system operates through collaboration between geologists and hydrologists at NVE, the MET and the NPRA.
In India, the Central Water Commission (CWC) and IMD play central roles in generating, modelling and disseminating information for national-level early warning. Yet the participation of the country's principal road authorities in the implementation chain is less clearly defined. Responsibilities are distributed among the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Border Roads Organisation (BRO). Their jurisdictions often intersect with the same Himalayan hazard zones, making coordination essential.
At the state level, state disaster management authorities play a leading role, under the broader framework of NDMA. But responsibilities across the many organisations involved are not always clearly defined. The result can be institutional fragmentation precisely when rapid, coordinated action is most necessary.
Norway has also increasingly moved towards communicating uncertainty in forecasts rather than presenting single-valued predictions. Acknowledging uncertainty may seem counterintuitive, but it can strengthen public trust by making clear what is known, what remains uncertain and how the forecast should inform decisions.
During IP4EWS, as we travelled from one municipality to another across Norway’s Troms county, the sparse population initially appeared to suggest lower vulnerability. Yet the reality was more complicated. Scattered houses connected by long stretches of roads, tunnels and fjord crossings were often exposed to avalanches, slush flows and other natural hazards (Picture 5).
Norway benefits from strong institutions, municipal capacity, infrastructure, resources and public awareness. Yet its dispersed population also presents challenges for mobilising people across geographically extensive emergencies.
For India and Nepal, this offers a different perspective. Population should not be viewed only as a source of vulnerability. When trained, organised and equipped, communities can become resilience capital: local observers, first responders, warning disseminators and custodians of knowledge about their surroundings.
The challenge is to transform exposed populations into active participants in disaster-risk reduction. This requires more than public awareness campaigns, sustained investment in community training, communication networks, local response capacity and the integration of traditional and scientific knowledge.
Disaster-risk reduction cannot end with saving lives. It must protect livelihoods, too. Physical protection through early warning, evacuation, resilient infrastructure and safe land-use planning must be complemented by financial protection, including affordable disaster insurance.
For India, making such insurance accessible will be challenging. Nevertheless, mechanisms could include subsidised premiums, public-private risk pools, government-backed reinsurance and simple, rapid claims processes linked to officially declared disasters and hazard maps. A broader insurance framework could reduce the financial burden of recovery and compensation on governments, allowing public resources to shift from post-disaster relief towards preparedness, risk reduction and early-warning systems.
India urgently needs to move from fragmented initiatives towards an integrated, science-driven Himalayan risk framework. This should include stronger instrumentation at elevations where intense rainfall was previously considered unlikely; comprehensive databases to support robust modelling; high-resolution topographic mapping through LiDAR surveys; satellite radar (SAR)-based monitoring; glacier and glacial-lake surveillance; and a comprehensive 'health card' for Himalayan catchments.
These research capabilities and datasets should be consolidated through a National Scheme for Risk Assessment and Mitigation, breaking down the institutional and disciplinary silos that constrain India's response. They should be supported by a dedicated scientific disaster-management policy.
Equally critical is the systematic, ground-based scientific documentation of disasters. Every event should become a source of carefully collected evidence, contributing to improved models, stronger mitigation standards and better preparedness for the next one. Without such documentation, the region risks repeating the same mistakes while losing valuable opportunities to learn from each disaster. These documents should be available as geospatial data on an integrated platform.
The IP4EWS project is a timely partnership between India, Canada and Norway, intended to strengthen climate adaptation and support resource-constrained rural and remote regions, particularly mountain communities exposed to natural hazards.
Norway can offer valuable lessons in institutional preparedness, governance, monitoring, early warning, evacuation planning and long-term investment. India, in turn, has experience in community mobilisation, resource-constrained disaster response, local knowledge and managing hazards across densely populated and highly exposed Himalayan environments.
Equally important is the need for Himalayan countries, including India, Nepal, Bhutan and China, to collaborate on cross-border disaster preparedness and early warning. Natural hazards and their consequences do not respect political boundaries. River systems, weather patterns, glaciers and mountain slopes are interconnected, and effective preparedness must reflect that reality.
The Himalayas needs nationally coordinated but geographically distributed observational networks, enabling research institutions to generate and share continuous observations as a common evidence base for early-warning systems. Instrumentation strategies must also be reconsidered, with greater attention to elevations and locations where intense rainfall was previously considered unlikely.
This calls for an integrated, end-to-end scientific framework. Climate-model projections must be downscaled and translated into hazard thresholds, which can then inform risk maps and operational forecasts. Crucially, the resulting information must be presented in forms that local administrations can understand and use to take timely decisions.