尼泊尔洪灾致千人遇难重建需450亿美元

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For much of the past week, the world has watched in shock as the aftermath of devastating floods in Nepal comes into focus. More than a thousand people were killed and thousands more are still missing after a glacial collapse swept ice, mud, rock, and water through valley communities along the [music] country's border with China. For all of us covering it, the thing that really stood out with the images, the images here we heard of the border, the checkpoint with China, of that sort of flood of water and the sheer destructive power of that wave, I think really took people back.

Bloomberg's Claraara Ferrer Marquez has been covering the disaster. We are still in the early stages of recovery. There is still a hunt for workers, hundreds of workers on various hydropower projects that have disappeared. Close to 12,000 people have been rescued and search teams in Nepal are still pulling out survivors. The hope of finding anyone alive is fading fast. It's difficult to access for rescuers. It's difficult for people to come down the mountain themselves and of course the disaster has affected a lot of the infrastructure, the bridges, the roads and all of that is complicating this still further.

Beyond the immense human [music] toll, the cost to rebuild are likely staggering. Nepal's finance minister has estimated the cost of rebuilding to be $45 billion, roughly a tenth of the [music] size of its economy. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in Asia. It's a $45 billion economy. [music] It, you know, had devastating earthquake in 2015 which set the country back billions of of dollars in reconstruction costs, left hundreds of thousands homeless.

As part of its recovery, Nepal has relied on its tourism industry. [music] It's also invested in hydro power projects, hoping to spur domestic development with cheap, reliable electricity and to [music] export surplus energy to neighboring countries. But Claraara says the location and the scale of this disaster has threatened [music] both. This is on the border between uh Nepal and China. So Nepal and Tibet. It's a popular pilgrim [music] route.

You have all this sort of administrative structure and military structure. So a lot of [music] people working at checkpoints at health health centers. And then you have the hydropower workers. So they really make up a very substantial portion of of the people missing [music] given the sheer scale of of hydropower construction in the wider region and and in this area in [music] particular.

One thing that we can see very clearly is that these instance are becoming [music] much more common.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg opinion columnist. He says a warming planet is creating special hazards for mountainous regions around the globe

because [music] these mountain landscapes really are held together by ice and the ice is melting. Eight of the 10 worst years for glacia ice losses have been [music] since 2016. And if you look in the eastern Himalayas, uh landslides are displacing about five times material, more material now than they were in the 1980s. [music] There's about um 15 million people who live at regions of risk of these sorts of floods. um about 10 million of them alone [music] are just in high mountain Asia essentially the the the broader Himalayan region. [music] This is the big take Asia from Bloomberg News.

I'm Rebecca Chung [music] Wilkins in for Wanha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies [music] and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this evershifting region. Today on the show, flooding on the northern border of Nepal [music] has devastated the region and claimed more than a thousand lives. But Nepal isn't the only country affected [music] by this kind of natural disaster.

We look at what triggered the floods, [music] what countries around the world are doing to prepare for similar events, and how one critical industry sits at the center of the challenge, [music] both as a solution and a petrol problem. Scientists currently believe the floods in northern Nepal were triggered when a massive chunk of ice and rock [music] broke away from a glacia high in the Himalayas. that in turn sent a powerful surge of water downstream [music] through the river and into communities.

You can't say that one particular landslide was caused by climate change because landslides in general are [music] you know contingent on such a a complicated array of things that go wrong a mountain [music] collapsing uh seasonal floods and that sort of thing. It's very hard to detect the signal of climate change. But in general, one thing that we can see very clearly is that these instance are becoming much more common because these mountain landscapes really are held together by ice and the ice is melting.

And Bloomberg opinions David Fickling says it's not just glaciers that are melting. Perafrost ground that's supposed to remain frozen year round is also thawing and that can make mountain sides less stable.

Roughly a quarter of the land area of the globe is what you could broadly call the cryossphere. So this is area where ice is predominant. A lot of that is ice cap obviously Antarctica and Greenland. Um but a huge stretch of that is the perafrost region. The perafrost is changing quite rapidly. You could have a layer of perafrost that's underlying a glacia and when that turns to non-melted soil and and rock. It's not nearly as robust as perafrost and then the glacia can just slide off like uh you know the slow sliding off a shallow roof in spring.

The disaster in Nepal has been catastrophic, but it was by no means unique. David says landslides and flash floods triggered by glaciers melting from warmer temperatures are a growing threat [music] in mountainous regions across the world.

This is quite a common thing around the world really on mainly four continents. North America, for instance, Juno, the capital city of Alaska, every year has a glacial lake outburst flood. The last one flowed through just last last [music] month. So that's a very common occurrence. Uh Switzerland, of course, many people remember the footage from last year of the little town of Blaten that was obliterated last year by a landslide very similar to this one.

South America, you have these sorts of things in the Andes. It's a sort of similar geography. Um [music] and of course India is probably the country that's most exposed to this. The only comparable disaster to this I can think of in recent years [music] uh is around the town of Kedanath which is a pilgrimage town in Utarakand state in the the Himalaym portion of India. More than 6,000 people were [music] killed in a series of flooding and landslide and glacia disasters there in about 2013.

By some estimates, around 15 million people live in areas at risk from glacial lake floods, with roughly 2/3 of them in the high mountains of Asia. As those risks grow, governments are grappling with the same challenge. How to anticipate and prepare for disasters that can unfold with little warning. But countries are not equally equipped.

Take the example of that Swiss village we talked about, Blaten, last year. That glacia has been heavily monitored and Switzerland has heavily monitored many of its um glacias for the best part of a century. There's a lot of understanding of what happens there. Swiss authorities began evacuating some residents from Blatan in midMay 2025. That was 9 days before the glacier actually collapsed. By contrast, warnings in Nepal came just minutes before the water swept through due to gaps in weather monitoring and data sharing with China.

In terms of information sharing, it sounds like a lot of the information sharing has been lacking. But but one thing I would add is that these are really genuinely very remote regions. The quality of information collection is just fundamen