KOTA KINABALU: The catastrophic ice-and-rock avalanche that struck the Nepal-Tibet border region on August 26 has highlighted the unequal burden of climate change, with environmentally vulnerable countries often left to bear the consequences despite contributing relatively little to the problem, says a Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) academic.
Senior lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, UMS, Marja Azlima Omar, said the disaster should prompt the international community to reconsider how global environmental risks were managed and shared.
"The atmosphere is perhaps the largest commons of all. No country owns it, yet every country uses it," she said.
She said for more than a century, countries and industries had released greenhouse gases while benefiting economically from energy production, industrialisation, transportation and consumption, while the environmental costs were spread across the planet.
"This creates an enormous imbalance. Major industrial economies have received much of the economic benefit, while geographically vulnerable societies face some of the gravest consequences," she said.
Marja said Nepal contributed only a very small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet its mountain communities were exposed to retreating glaciers, unstable slopes, changing precipitation patterns and increasingly unpredictable water systems.
The avalanche sent large quantities of ice, rock, water and debris into river systems, triggering flash floods that swept through settlements and damaged roads, bridges and hydropower facilities.
Hundreds of lives were lost, thousands were reported missing and tens of thousands were affected.
Marja said scientists should continue investigating the precise combination of geological and climatic factors behind the August avalanche, cautioning against attributing the disaster solely to climate change before the evidence was complete.
"Nevertheless, experts have warned that unusually high temperatures can increase melting and weaken the frozen bonds that help hold mountain ice and rock together.
"Climate change therefore functions as a risk multiplier, making already fragile Himalayan environments potentially more unstable," she said.
The tragedy of the commons
Marja said the disaster could be viewed through Garrett Hardin's influential concept of the "tragedy of the commons", first outlined in his 1968 essay published in Science.
Hardin used the example of a shared pasture where individual herders had an incentive to add more animals because they received the immediate benefit while the environmental damage was shared by everyone.
Marja said the same principle could be applied to the global atmosphere, where individual countries could view their own emissions as a small contribution to a much larger problem.
"Every government may believe that its own emissions, infrastructure projects or delays in reducing fossil-fuel dependence constitute only a small addition to the global problem.
"Yet when similar decisions are repeated across many countries, the cumulative result is a warmer and less stable climate," she said.
She said the consequences, however, were not distributed equally.
"Mountain communities contribute little to the forces transforming the global climate; paradoxically, they stand on the front line of its consequences," she said.
Need for cross-border cooperation
Marja said the Nepal disaster also demonstrated the limitations of addressing environmental problems within national borders.
"Rivers, glaciers and weather systems do not respect political boundaries," she said, adding that disturbances in transboundary mountain regions could rapidly threaten communities in more than one country.
She said effective protection required greater cooperation in scientific monitoring, satellite observation, hydrological information, early-warning systems and emergency response.
"Nor should vulnerable states be expected to finance climate adaptation entirely from their limited national resources," she said.
Marja said countries that had contributed most to historical emissions had a responsibility to provide accessible climate finance, technology and technical expertise to vulnerable countries.
However, she said Hardin's theory should not be interpreted as meaning environmental destruction was unavoidable.
Citing the work of political scientist Elinor Ostrom, she said communities could successfully manage shared resources when they developed trusted institutions, clear responsibilities, monitoring systems and fair rules.
"The real problem is not necessarily the existence of a commons, but the absence of effective and equitable governance," she said.
Nepal's warning for the world
Marja said the lesson from Nepal was not that human activity had created every avalanche, as avalanches and landslides had always been part of mountain environments.
Rather, she said human choices could intensify environmental instability, increase people's exposure and determine whether a natural hazard became a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Himalayas are sometimes described as the "water towers of Asia" because their glaciers and snowfields support river systems on which vast populations depend.
Marja said their protection was therefore not solely Nepal's responsibility, as the stability of the region had wider significance.
"More than half a century later, the Nepal tragedy gives that warning an urgent human meaning.
"If the atmosphere continues to be treated as a free dumping ground, vulnerable communities will continue paying for benefits enjoyed elsewhere," she said.
She said Nepal's suffering should not become another warning that the world acknowledged and mourned before eventually forgetting.
"The question is no longer whether humanity understands the tragedy of the commons. The question is whether governments are prepared to prevent it," she said.
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