Nepal’s unsettling scenes should feel deeply personal in Kashmir.
The images of streets swallowed by torrents, homes threatened by surging water and communities confronting sudden destruction are a reminder that the Himalayas are entering a more dangerous chapter, where old assumptions about seasons, rainfall and mountain stability are losing their reliability.
Whatever the precise causes behind Nepal’s latest crisis, one lesson already stands clear: when nature strikes with force, it rarely follows the script humans have written for it.
The mountains have their own language, and climate change is making that language harder to ignore.
Kashmir has heard these warnings before. Floods have repeatedly tested Srinagar and other towns. Sudden cloudbursts have turned streams into torrents. Unseasonal rain, shrinking snow cover, rising temperatures and changing weather patterns have begun altering agriculture, water supplies and the pulse of life in the valley.
Glaciers and snowfields in the wider Himalayan system are also retreating, putting another question mark over the water future of millions.
The danger lies partly in the way development continues as though the old climate still exists. Roads climb steeper slopes, buildings spread along waterways, drainage channels shrink or disappear, wetlands face pressure, and construction often proceeds with little attention to the natural paths taken by water.
A mountain stream remembers its route even when a concrete wall forgets it.
That is where Nepal becomes a lesson for Kashmir. The answer lies beyond another project, road or concrete embankment.
Kashmir needs a sweeping review of its development model, infrastructure plans and everyday relationship with nature. Planners should ask where water will go during an extreme downpour, what happens when a river rises beyond its recorded level, and how much pressure a hillside can absorb before it gives way.
The same questions belong in ordinary life.
Wetlands should remain open, drainage channels should remain functional, forests should remain protected and rivers should have room to breathe.
Every new structure in a vulnerable zone adds another calculation to a future emergency.
There is an old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Climate change has given that proverb a Himalayan scale.
Kashmir still has time to learn before a larger disaster writes the lesson in stone. The choice is between planning for the mountains we have today and preparing for the mountains climate change is creating.
The chickens, as the saying goes, eventually come home to roost. Kashmir would be wiser to repair the coop before the storm arrives.
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