The Chinese Nepalese border site. (Picture from Wikimedia)

Jo Nova
Date: 30 August 2026

“This is the cost of not acting in the face of the Climate Crisis”, says Sunil Acharya, International Climate Policy and Just Transition Specialist in Kathmandu, whatever that is. But who could blame him. With a job title like that, he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t put out a plea now in light of the awful events this week. I’d like to ask him just how many solar panels we need to install to stop these catastrophes?

Meanwhile The Guardian says “Prepare for more Climate Linked Disasters“, warning of impending doom that they know how to prevent, just as witchdoctors have for thousands of years. Their fortune-tellers can stop these tragedies if you give them enough grant money, pay a tithe to their pet solar and wind industries, and vote for their favourite politicians who Spend Bigly!

But sadly, landslides happen all the time

The thing is, Nepal is a country full of steep slopes and deep valleys covered with megatons of water, so sadly landslides are common in the Himalayas. They’re so common that this, below, is a map of landslides in the region during 2024, and this is not all the landslides that year, only the fatal ones. Blue dots mark ones that happened in winter, green in spring, yellow is late spring, orange and red are summer, and brown is autumn. It’s not so much “climate change” as a seasonal thing. And every dot is a human tragedy.

From Dave Petley, The Landscape Blog. 2024 Fatal landslides in the Himalayas.

The worst catastrophe was 800 years ago

And naturally, bigger, more catastrophic landslides have happened before anyone built a coal plant. Around 1190 AD a monster size slip occurred on Anapurna IV. Researchers estimate a gargantuan 23 cubic kilometers of material fell in a cataclysm that the researchers described in the following excerpt from EOS in 2023 as being “1,000 times greater than recent landslides.”

A Massive Landslide Beheaded One of the World’s Highest Peaks

Annapurna IV toppled in a Himalayan landslide, and scientists finally figured out when and how it happened.

“A landslide of this size is unheard of,” said glacial geologist Ann Rowan from the University of Bergen. But the study laid out convincing evidence that such events shape the highest regions of Earth once every few hundred thousand years, she and other experts said.

Around 1190, the top of Annapurna IV came crashing down all at once, the researchers found. If the city of Pokhara—Nepal’s second most populated metropolitan area—had existed at the time, it would have been decimated. Instead, the landslide created the flat surface that allowed people to settle in the region.

They can’t decide whether it was due to an earthquake or to the Medieval Warm Period. But everyone is pretty sure that it wasn’t due to cars, trucks and internal combustion engines.

Landslides globally are much more common than people may realize

There were 4,862 events between 2004 to 2016, and together  they killed some 56,000 people. During this time, humans poured out 400 billion tons of carbon emissions, but who can spot the effect…?

Froude MJ and Petley DN 

And fatalities don’t appear to be increasing either, even though populations are increasing:

The number of fatalities from landslides that are not due to earthquakes. Froude MJ and Petley DN 

And if we just focus on rainfall triggered landslides because global warming might increase rain…. there’s no effect either (graph ‘a’ below). And if we take out the effect of earthquakes (graph ‘b’, below) there is, again, a big nothing, no trend.

The authors of this paper admit that human activity may cause more landslides than climate change does:

Our analysis demonstrates that landslide occurrence triggered by human activity is increasing, in particular in relation to construction, illegal mining and hill cutting. This supports notions that human disturbance may be more detrimental to future landslide incidence than climate.

Finally, just to show how fickle our media is, and how tragically common landslides are, consider Africa

In another horror show just last week, 109 people were killed in a collapse in an artisanal gold mine in Zamboye in Central African Republic. That didn’t even make the news in the West. And there is confronting video footage on Youtube they could have used.

But perhaps stories like this just remind us how lucky we are not to live and work in these conditions. Since that doesn’t help sell Union demands, climate change, or get voters to elect Big spending governments, it appears journalists didn’t have much interest.

It’s just awful to watch. The danger with videos like this is that it might remind voters that Western lifestyles are rich beyond imagination and something worth fighting for.

The 18 August 2026 gold mine landslide at the Zamboye (Zamboï) mining site in the Central African Republic (Youtube).

Or they might wonder what we pay the UN for when they’re organizing $150 million dollar conferences at beach resorts in the Pacific to save islands that are not sinking, instead of helping people prevent this?

With best wishes and sincere condolences for everyone suffering from these events wherever you are.

REFERENCES

Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018

Eos — Dave Petley’s Landslide blog

This article was published first on joannenova.com.au on 29 August 2026.

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