Essay: ‘I stood and watched a place I loved vanish’

For 11 years I stayed in the same hotel during my visits to Syabru Besi, a small Nepali town that sat high on a ridge where the trail to the Langtang Valley begins.

Langtang is one of Nepal’s most beautiful trekking routes, a path that climbs until the valley opens up and the mountains fill every direction, close enough to feel like you could reach out and touch them.

In all that time, the hotel room never changed, and neither did the sound. At night I could hear the Trishuli River, but I could never see it. It ran down the gorge, far below the village. Just to catch a glimpse of that thin silver line of water, you had to walk out to the edge of the village, lean over the ridge, and search for it.

Syabru Besi held onto itself in a way almost nowhere in Nepal manages now. Same shopfronts. Same faces. There had been no coffee in the town at all on my first visit in 2014. By 2025 the hotel owner was telling me, a little proud, “Syabru has changed now, there’s a café up the road. Better coffee than anything you’ll get in the trendiest corner of Kathmandu.” There was a famous momo place, too, selling steaming hot dumplings that dripped with local flavor. On my last visit it was packed, every table taken. Syabru Besi had stopped being just a stop on the road to the mountains. It had become a small town climbing, slowly, toward something better.

Kum Seong Wan/iStock Editorial/Getty Images

Kum Seong Wan/iStockphoto/Getty Images

Then on August 31, 2026, I walked into that market and found no one.

I had come this time not as a trekker but as part of a CNN team covering the disaster in Nepal. I had watched the footage. It did not prepare me.

The momo restaurant still stood, the building anyway, and it was empty. The café was gone. And the hotel I had slept in for 11 years, the one where I could hear the Trishuli without ever seeing it, was not there at all. The river had taken it. The Trishuli was closer than I had seen it in all those years, having risen what looked to me like 260 feet (80 meters) or more. Never did I imagine standing in Syabru Besi with the Trishuli lapping that close to my feet.

It had climbed all the way up to meet me.

Syabru Besi was only where the grief started.

I traveled the corridor up from Galchi toward Rasuwagadhi, past Betrawati, Mailung, Shantibazar, Timure, Trishuli Bazaar – towns with names, with shopkeepers, with morning routines.

At every turn of the river the same thing had happened: both banks stripped to bare rock and gray water. Not damaged. Erased. Where houses and tea shops and bus parks had stood, there was now a riverbed giving off a bad smell, and you could hardly believe this rubble had been a living market a week before.

The flood came off the China-Nepal border on the morning of 26 August. Weather stations near the border had logged little or no rain. Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology believes a glacier snapped , triggering a landslide that formed a lake which burst its banks, throwing a wall of water and debris down the Bhotekoshi River. The glacier gave way at 8:37 that morning, according to the US Geological Survey, and within 13 minutes the flood had destroyed the river gauge at the Syabru Besi hydrological station. Not hours. Minutes.

Shankar Bhujel/Sipa USA/AP

The toll is staggering and still rising.

The disaster struck dozens of settlements along a 45-mile (72-kilometer) stretch of the Trishuli, killing at least 1,300 people. Some of the dead were carried 150 kilometers downstream, into India. Thousands remain missing.

A government damage committee counted 7,570 buildings destroyed across five districts; the finance minister has since estimated the full reconstruction cost could reach $5 billion. Engineers, hydropower workers, customs staff and traders are among the missing, and so are people who were very close to me. I keep their faces out of this essay, because their families are still waiting, and hope is a fragile and private thing.

A warning had come before.

In July 2025 a flood off the Lhende River poured into this same Bhotekoshi River, killing at least nine people and tearing away the Miteri friendship bridge that ties Nepal to China. We rebuilt. A temporary Bailey bridge went up. Trade came limping back. Fourteen months later, the mountain sent something far bigger, and this time there was nothing left to rebuild.

To grasp what the Trishuli corridor was, you have to understand that, in Nepal, a road is never only a road.

The Pasang Lhamu Highway, and the river running beside it, made these small towns. People came down out of the hills for the market, the connection, the opening the road gave them, and Betrawati and Trishuli Bazaar filled up with them.

Opportunity built these places, and now both the opportunity and the places are gone. Downstream, the disaster sank a section of the Prithvi Highway at Krishnabhir, cutting the main artery between Kathmandu and the rest of the country, and left the whole Langtang Valley severed, some 450 people reachable only by helicopter or a two-day walk.

Sameer Shrestha/Anadolu/Getty Images

The corridor carried the country’s northern trade as well. The Rasuwagadhi–Kerung crossing is Nepal’s largest China-facing customs point, handling roughly $563 million in imports last fiscal year: computers, machinery, electronics, garments, the goods that stock Kathmandu’s shelves before the festivals. About 19% of everything Nepal imports comes from China, and a large share of that overland flow moved through this valley.

Even before August, none of Nepal’s three major China trade points were fully working.

Landslides had shut Tatopani. Korala was clearing two or three trucks a day at 4,650 meters. Rasuwagadhi was still limping from the previous year’s flooding. Now the busiest of the three is a gash in the ground. Open up that one fact and the cost inside it is enormous, for traders, for prices, for a small economy that could not absorb such a loss even in a good year.

Here is what keeps an economist like myself up at night. Nepal has wagered its future on the very water now ripping through its valleys.

Hydropower, next to remittances, is one of the few genuine engines this economy has. Consider how total the wager is. Almost all of Nepal’s electricity comes from hydropower.

Nepal’s installed capacity has climbed to somewhere between 3,400 and 3,900 MW, nearly all of it hydro, with more than 4,000 MW under construction and a pipeline the industry prices in the tens of billions of dollars.

Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

By 2029, installed capacity is expected to triple to almost 12,000 MW, and by 2035, the latest climate pledge could see that more than double again. Nearly every one of those megawatts sits in a river gorge like this one.

And the rivers are turning on the very projects built to harness them. The flood disaster damaged or destroyed 13 hydropower projects along the Bhotekoshi and the Trishuli, knocking out 12% of the country’s total electricity capacity.

Last week, as I stood beside the muddied remains of the Trishuli 3A hydropower station that had, days before, been lighting homes in Kathmandu, I thought about the rest of the projects upstream on the Bhotekoshi, the ones drawn up for basins we have not yet learned to be afraid of.

If a glacial collapse can wipe out a 45-mile corridor in 13 minutes, then what are we building, and where?

I was raised on the idea that human civilization began on riverbanks, that water is where people gather and cities take hold. Standing in a bed of boulders where families used to sleep, I have come to believe the reverse now holds here.

They are not going back. A life cannot be rebuilt on a floor of stone. For a country earning around $1,500 a head, putting Betrawati, Timure, Shantibazar and Mailung back where they physically stood is not merely hard. It cannot be done.

The ground itself is gone, turned into channel. Nor does the harm stop at the flood line. The downstream markets, the ones the water only scared rather than destroyed, will carry the corridor’s death in lost trade and thinning footfall for years.

Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images

So, the real question is not whether civilization comes back to the Trishuli corridor. It will not. The question is how we shield the civilizations along the other corridors, because there are so many of them.

Nepal is a country of rivers, more than eight major basins, and along nearly every one of them sit towns exactly like Syabru Besi: ordinary, hopeful, set a little too near water that keeps rising. Far above them the glaciers are melting, and the lakes they feed are swelling and breaking loose.

China itself warned on August 31 of a continuing risk from fresh glacier collapse along the same border, even as we were still counting our dead. What used to be a catastrophe that came once in a generation is turning into something we brace for every monsoon. Nepal’s own disaster report recorded more than 32,000 small- and large-scale disaster incidents between 2018 and 2024, roughly 5,400 a year, a curve bending the wrong way.

Inside the loud catastrophe there is a quieter one, and as an economist it may be the one that frightens me most.

Every disaster like this one manufactures poor Nepalis. A flood takes the house, the crop, the livestock, the shop, the savings. The family borrows to rebuild, then borrows again to eat, and by the time the next disaster lands they are weaker than they were.

Nepal’s poverty rate fell from 41.8% in 1995 to about 20% by 2023, but that progress has stalled precisely as disasters have multiplied.

In the late 1990s poverty was dropping by 1.36 percentage points a year. But those gains were built on remittances, not on resilient growth, and disasters are eating those gains one valley at a time. Across the last 12 years, the span that holds the 2015 earthquake and the Covid pandemic, it has crept down by just 0.41 points a year. The 2015 earthquake alone shoved as many as 982,000 people back below the poverty line.

The Melamchi flood of 2021 set some in the worst-hit ward back even further, thrusting more into multidimensional poverty – poorer not just in income but in education, health and living standards. Our poverty gains were built on remittances, not on resilient growth, and disasters are eating those gains one valley at a time. The Rasuwa flood has not only ended lives. It has quietly begun turning middle-income families along the Trishuli into poor ones.

And yet, what gives me hope is the resilience of ordinary Nepalis.

We have come through the 2015 earthquake, the Covid years, the Gen-Z uprising, and after each blow this country has somehow risen back stronger, its people returning to their lives and their livelihoods faster than anyone had a right to expect. I stood in a riverbed that had been a town that I loved, and I still believe we will come back from this one too.

Bubaas Shrestha/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Subaas/Shrestha/NurPhoto/Getty Images

But belief is not a plan, and resilience is no substitute for support. We will need it, for the families still combing the downstream banks, for the towns that must be relocated rather than rebuilt, and for a small mountain nation that did almost nothing to warm the planet now seeing its glaciers melt above its own people’s heads.

Because that is the whole of it. A climate shifting faster than we are ready for.

Glacial lakes filling quietly in the peaks above towns that are still asleep, towns that do not yet know their names are on a list. The dead we have already counted, and the far larger number still standing in the water’s path. Trade routes cut , an economy left exposed, an energy future we are gambling on with the risk folded quietly into the wager.

I stood and watched a place I loved vanish. And I keep coming back to the one thing I cannot shake: this is a country that keeps returning to the water, for its towns, its trade, its power, its whole idea of the future, while the water keeps rising up to take it all back.

11 年来，每次去尼泊尔小镇夏布鲁贝西（Syabru Besi）——它坐落在山脊高处，通往朗唐山谷的小路就从那里开始——我都住在同一家酒店。

朗唐是尼泊尔最美丽的徒步路线之一，这条小路一路向上，直到山谷豁然开朗，群山环绕四周，仿佛触手可及。

这么多年来，旅馆房间一成不变，声音也未曾改变。夜里，我能听到特里苏里河的潺潺流水声，却始终不见它的身影。它沿着峡谷向下流淌，远远地流过村庄。想要瞥见那条细细的银线，你必须走到村边，探身越过山脊，仔细寻找。

夏布鲁贝西保留了原有的风貌，这在如今的尼泊尔几乎绝无仅有。同样的店面，同样的面孔。2014年我第一次来的时候，镇上根本没有咖啡馆。到了2025年，酒店老板略带自豪地告诉我：“夏布鲁现在不一样了，路边新开了一家咖啡馆。那里的咖啡比加德满都最时髦的街区里任何一家都好喝。”镇上还有一家远近闻名的馍馍店，卖的馍馍热气腾腾，馅料浓郁，充满了当地风味。我最后一次来的时候，店里人满为患，座无虚席。夏布鲁贝西不再只是通往山区路上的一个驿站，它已经变成了一个正在缓缓向着美好未来迈进的小镇。

Kum Seong Wan/iStock Editorial/Getty Images

Kum Seong Wan/iStockphoto/Getty Images

2026年8月31日，我走进那个市场，却发现一个人也没有。

我这次来尼泊尔并非以徒步旅行者的身份，而是作为CNN报道尼泊尔灾难的团队成员。我看过相关的影像资料，但这并没有让我做好准备。

那家馍馍店还在，至少那栋楼还在，但里面空无一人。咖啡馆没了。我住了11年的那家酒店，那家我能听到特里苏里河潺潺流水声却从未见过河面的酒店，也彻底消失了。它被河水吞噬了。特里苏里河比我这些年来见过的任何时候都更近，在我看来，河水上涨了至少260英尺（80米）。我从未想过自己会站在夏布鲁贝西，特里苏里河如此近距离地拍打着我的脚。

它一路爬上来和我见面。

Syabru Besi 只是悲伤的开始。

我从加尔奇出发，沿着走廊向拉苏瓦加迪方向行进，途经贝特拉瓦蒂、迈隆、尚蒂巴扎、蒂穆尔、特里苏利巴扎——这些城镇都有名字、有店主、有早晨的日常活动。

河流的每个转弯处都发生了同样的事情：两岸只剩下裸露的岩石和灰蒙蒙的河水。不是受损，而是被抹去了。曾经的房屋、茶馆和公交车站，如今只剩下散发着恶臭的河床，你很难相信，一周前这里还是一片热闹的集市。

8月26日清晨，洪水从中尼边境涌来。边境附近的气象站几乎没有记录到降雨。尼泊尔水文气象局认为，冰川断裂引发山体滑坡，形成湖泊，湖水决堤后，裹挟着大量泥石流的洪水涌入博特科西河。据美国地质调查局称，冰川于当天上午8点37分断裂，短短13分钟内，洪水就摧毁了夏布鲁贝西水文站的水位计。不是几小时，而是几分钟。

Shankar Bhujel/Sipa USA/AP

死亡人数惊人，而且还在不断上升。

这场灾难袭击了特里苏里河沿岸72公里（45英里）长的数十个村落，造成至少1300人死亡。部分遇难者被洪水冲到下游150公里外的印度境内。目前仍有数千人失踪。

政府灾后重建委员会统计，五个区共有7570栋建筑被毁；财政部长随后估计，重建总费用可能高达50亿美元。工程师、水电工人、海关人员和贸易商都在失踪之列，我的一些至亲好友也下落不明。我没有在文中提及他们的面容，因为他们的家人仍在等待，而希望是脆弱而私密的。

之前已有警告。

2025年7月，伦德河洪水涌入博特科西河，造成至少9人死亡，并冲毁了连接尼泊尔和中国的米特里友谊桥。我们重建了桥梁，架起了一座临时贝利桥，贸易也开始缓慢恢复。十四个月后，山体再次发生更严重的灾害，这一次，一切都已无法重建。

要了解特里苏里走廊的意义，你必须明白，在尼泊尔，一条路从来不仅仅是一条路。

帕桑拉姆公路及其旁流淌的河流造就了这些小镇。人们从山上下来，为了集市、交通和道路带来的便利，贝特拉瓦蒂和特里苏里集市都挤满了人。

机遇造就了这些地方，如今机遇和地方都已不复存在。下游，灾难导致克里希纳比尔的普里特维公路一段沉没，切断了加德满都与尼泊尔其他地区之间的主要交通干线，整个朗唐山谷与外界隔绝，约450名居民只能通过直升机或步行两天才能抵达。

Sameer Shrestha/Anadolu/Getty Images

这条走廊也承载着尼泊尔北部的贸易。拉苏瓦加迪-吉隆口岸是尼泊尔最大的对华海关，上个财政年度处理了约5.63亿美元的进口商品，包括电脑、机械、电子产品、服装，以及节庆前摆满加德满都货架的商品。尼泊尔进口商品中约有19%来自中国，而这部分陆路贸易很大一部分都经由这条山谷。

早在 8 月之前，尼泊尔通往中国的三个主要贸易口岸就没有一个完全正常运作。

山体滑坡导致塔托帕尼（Tatopani）交通瘫痪。科拉拉（Korala）每天只能清理海拔4650米处的两三辆卡车积雪。拉苏瓦加迪（Rasuwagadhi）仍在艰难地从去年的洪灾中恢复过来。如今，这三个地方中最繁忙的科拉拉却变成了一道巨大的山口。揭开这一个事实，其背后的代价是巨大的：对贸易商、物价，以及一个即使在丰年也无法承受如此巨大损失的小经济体而言，都是如此。

这就是让我这样的经济学家夜不能寐的原因。尼泊尔将自己的未来押在了如今正奔腾于山谷间的水流之上。

除了侨汇之外，水力发电是尼泊尔经济为数不多的真正引擎之一。想想看，这笔投资有多么巨大。尼泊尔几乎所有的电力都来自水力发电。

尼泊尔的装机容量已攀升至 3400 至 3900 兆瓦之间，几乎全部为水力发电，另有 4000 多兆瓦正在建设中，还有一条管道，据业内人士估计，其价值达数百亿美元。

纳维什·奇特拉卡尔/路透社

到2029年，装机容量预计将增长两倍，达到近12000兆瓦；而根据最新的气候承诺，到2035年，这一数字可能还会再翻一番以上。几乎每一兆瓦的装机容量都位于像这样的河谷地带。

河流正在反噬那些旨在利用它们而建造的水利工程。洪水灾害损毁了博特科西河和特里苏里河沿岸的13座水电站，导致全国12%的电力供应中断。

上周，当我站在特里苏里 3A 水电站泥泞的废墟旁时，我想起了博特科西河上游的其他项目，那些为我们尚未学会畏惧的流域而制定的项目。几天前，这座水电站还在为加德满都的居民提供电力。

如果冰川崩塌能在 13 分钟内摧毁 45 英里长的走廊，那么我们究竟在建造什么，又在哪里建造呢？

我从小就被灌输这样的观念：人类文明起源于河岸，水是人们聚集、城市兴起的地方。然而，站在这片曾经是人们栖身之所的巨石堆上，我却开始相信，如今情况恰恰相反。

他们回不去了。生活无法在石板地上重建。对于一个人均收入仅约1500美元的国家来说，让贝特拉瓦蒂、蒂穆尔、尚蒂巴扎尔和迈隆回到他们曾经生活的地方，不仅仅是困难，而是不可能。

地面已不复存在，变成了河道。而且，破坏远不止于洪水线。下游的市场，那些仅仅被洪水吓到而未被摧毁的市场，将因贸易损失和客流量减少而承受这条走廊消亡带来的后果，这种情况将持续数年。

马南·瓦齐亚纳/法新社/盖蒂图片社

所以，真正的问题不在于文明是否会重返特里苏里走廊。它不会。问题在于我们如何保护其他走廊沿线的文明，因为这样的走廊实在太多了。

尼泊尔是一个河流纵横的国家，拥有八个以上的大流域，几乎每条河流沿岸都坐落着像夏布鲁贝西这样的小镇：平凡而充满希望，却又离不断上涨的河水太近。在它们上方，冰川正在融化，冰川汇聚的湖泊正在膨胀，甚至决堤。

8月31日，中国就已发出警告，指出同一边界沿线冰川崩塌的风险依然存在，而我们仍在统计死亡人数。曾经一代人才会遭遇一次的灾难，如今却变成了我们每年季风季节都要提心吊胆的威胁。尼泊尔自身的灾害报告显示，2018年至2024年间，该国发生了超过32000起大大小小的灾害事件，平均每年约5400起，这一趋势令人担忧。

在喧嚣的灾难背后，隐藏着一场较为平静的灾难，而作为一名经济学家，这或许才是最令我恐惧的。

每一次这样的灾难都会造就更多贫困的尼泊尔人。洪水冲走房屋、庄稼、牲畜、店铺和积蓄。一家人借钱重建家园，然后为了糊口再次借钱，等到下一次灾难来袭时，他们比以前更加贫困潦倒。

尼泊尔的贫困率从 1995 年的 41.8% 下降到 2023 年的约 20%，但随着灾害的增多，这一进展却停滞不前。

上世纪90年代末，贫困率每年下降1.36个百分点。但这些成果是建立在汇款而非经济韧性增长的基础上的，而灾难正在一点点地蚕食这些成果。在过去的12年里——包括2015年地震和新冠疫情——贫困率每年仅下降0.41个百分点。仅2015年地震就使多达98.2万人重新跌入贫困线以下。

2021年的梅拉姆奇洪水使受灾最严重的地区部分居民的处境雪上加霜，更多人陷入多维贫困——不仅收入减少，教育、健康和生活水平也下降。我们减贫的成果是建立在汇款而非可持续增长的基础上的，而灾害正在蚕食这些成果，一个接一个地吞噬着这些成果。拉苏瓦洪水不仅夺去了生命，也悄然将特里苏里河沿岸的中等收入家庭变成了贫困家庭。

然而，真正让我感到充满希望的是尼泊尔普通民众的韧性。

我们挺过了2015年的地震、新冠疫情肆虐的岁月、Z世代的崛起，每一次打击过后，这个国家都以惊人的速度重新崛起，人民也以远超预期的速度回归正常生活。我站在曾经是我深爱的城镇的河床上，我仍然相信，这一次我们也一定能够重振旗鼓。

Bubaas Shrestha/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Subaas/Shrestha/NurPhoto/Getty Images

但信念并非计划，韧性也无法替代支持。我们需要支持，为了那些仍在下游河岸边搜寻家园的家庭，为了那些不得不搬迁而非重建的城镇，也为了那个对全球变暖几乎没有贡献的小小山地国家，如今却眼睁睁地看着冰川在自己人民头顶融化。

因为这就是全部真相：气候变化的速度比我们准备的速度还要快。

冰川湖泊在山巅静静蓄满，山巅之上，城镇依旧沉睡，那些城镇甚至还未曾知晓自己的名字，它们已被列入名单。逝去的生命我们已清点完毕，而更多的人仍挡在洪水的路径上。贸易路线被切断，经济岌岌可危，我们押注于能源的未来，却悄然将风险融入赌注之中。

我站在那里，眼睁睁地看着我深爱的地方消失。我始终无法摆脱一个念头：这个国家如此依赖水，它的城镇、贸易、力量，乃至整个未来都离不开水，而海水却不断上涨，最终将这一切吞噬。