climate crisis

New Delhi, India – On the morning of August 26, the Himalayan landscape above Nepal’s Rasuwa district changed in minutes.

A mass of ice and rock broke loose high in the mountains and sent a violent surge of water, mud and debris down the Lhende Khola River. The torrent travelled through valleys, swept away settlements and infrastructure and eventually reached the Nepal-China border.

What followed was not simply a flood.

It was a chain reaction.

By mid-September, more than 1,400 people had been reported dead and at least 6,000 remained missing in Nepal and across the border in Tibet. Twelve hydropower plants were destroyed, while roads, bridges and homes were buried or washed away.

The scale of the destruction has left scientists and disaster managers confronting a difficult question: How do you warn communities about a disaster whose trigger may occur high above them, in terrain that is difficult to monitor and where there may be only minutes to react?

Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Centre for Disaster Studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, described the event to Al Jazeera as unprecedented in size, affected area and mechanism. His estimate suggested that the energy involved was greater than that released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a comparison intended to illustrate the scale of the physical forces involved rather than suggest that the event was equivalent to a nuclear explosion.

For scientists who study the Himalayas, the disaster demonstrated how quickly an event originating in a remote, high-altitude environment can become a regional catastrophe.

And Nepal is not alone.

The warning problem

A warming climate is altering glaciers, snow cover, permafrost and high-altitude lakes. At the same time, roads, hydropower projects, tourist facilities and settlements have pushed deeper into mountain valleys.

That combination is creating a new risk landscape in which one hazard can trigger another.

An avalanche can block a river. A blocked river can form a temporary lake. A sudden release can become a debris flow. That debris can destroy a road or bridge, block another river and create another flood downstream.

The August disaster in Nepal showed how quickly such a sequence can unfold. It also exposed a weakness in the way early-warning systems are often designed.

Many systems are built around a particular hazard: rainfall, river level or glacial lake outburst flood. But the Himalayas do not always respect those categories.

In July, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD, warned that a below-normal monsoon should not be interpreted as a safer one.

“The biggest misunderstanding is that less seasonal rainfall means lower flood risk,” said Saswata Sanyal, a disaster risk reduction specialist at ICIMOD.

“A drier monsoon can still be a dangerous monsoon,” he added, warning that seasonal averages cannot capture the cloudbursts capable of producing catastrophic flooding in mountain valleys.

The Nepal disaster went a step further.

The immediate trigger was not simply heavy rainfall.

Scientists have been examining an ice-rock avalanche and other possible processes that temporarily obstructed the river system before releasing a destructive surge. ICIMOD has described the event as an ice avalanche rather than a conventional glacial lake outburst flood, while other scientists have examined the role of local seismic activity and other high-altitude processes.

That distinction matters.

A warning system waiting for rainfall or a rising river may not provide enough time when the real trigger happens several kilometres upstream and above the line of sight of the communities below.

Kashmir’s warning signs

Thousands of kilometres away, scientists studying Kashmir’s Himalayas are seeing another part of the same problem.

A study published in the Journal of Glaciology this year mapped 155 glacial lakes above 2,500 metres (8,200ft) across the Himalayas in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The researchers found that the area of ice-contact proglacial lakes – bodies of water that form directly against the margin of a melting glacier, trapped by moraine ridges, bedrock basins, or ice dams – had increased by 26 percent between 1992 and 2024.

Five lakes were classified as having very high susceptibility to glacial lake outburst floods.

An outburst from those lakes, the researchers found, could threaten several thousand buildings, 15 major bridges, roads and a hydropower project.

More significantly, the study warned that hazards could occur in chains, with an upstream lake outburst potentially triggering secondary events downstream.

For Irfan Rashid, a glaciologist and associate professor at the University of Kashmir who co-authored the study, the implications extend beyond individual lakes.

Rashid recently told Al Jazeera that without action, the melting, thinning, and destabilisation of glaciers, seasonal snow cover, and permafrost along the Hindu Kush-Himalayas system would increase, and water shortages could become a major problem across the Upper Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins by the end of the century.

That is why the Nepal disaster resonates in Kashmir.

The landscapes are different, the rivers are different and the individual hazards may differ. But the underlying problem is increasingly similar: Communities living downstream of a rapidly changing high-altitude environment may have little time to respond when something breaks loose above them.

The challenge is particularly acute in places where roads, bridges and hydropower projects occupy narrow valleys.

Once a mountain river begins carrying enormous quantities of rock, ice and mud, infrastructure designed for conventional floods can quickly become irrelevant.

Pakistan has already begun building a warning network

The same concern runs across the western Himalayas and Karakoram ranges.

The Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan-administered Kashmir contains hundreds of glaciers and glacial lakes, while communities and infrastructure sit along valleys exposed to sudden floods and landslides.

Pakistan has responded by expanding early-warning infrastructure.

Under a United Nations-supported programme, early-warning systems, evacuation shelters, disaster-management centres and other protective measures have been established in vulnerable valleys.

But technology alone cannot solve the problem. A sensor can detect a change. Someone still has to receive the message. Someone has to understand what it means. And people downstream have to have a route to safety.

That last part is often the weakest link. A siren is useful only if the people hearing it know where to go. An automatic warning is useful only if it arrives before the flood. A satellite image is useful only if the information can be converted into a decision quickly enough to save lives.

This is why disaster scientists increasingly talk about anticipatory action rather than simply disaster response.

“The era of preparing for a single, predictable hazard is over,” Sanyal said earlier this year. “Anticipatory action and early warning must now be the foundation.”

The infrastructure trap

The Himalayas are also becoming more heavily engineered.

Hydropower is central to Nepal’s economy. Roads are being expanded. Border crossings are growing in importance. Tourism is pushing deeper into remote valleys.

The benefits are obvious. So are the risks.

The August disaster struck an area where hydropower infrastructure was concentrated along the river corridor. At least 900 workers were believed to have been inside tunnels and other facilities in the aftermath, making rescue operations extraordinarily difficult. Two workers were eventually pulled alive from a hydropower tunnel nine days after the disaster.

The question is no longer simply whether infrastructure can withstand a flood. It is whether planners have adequately considered what happens when a flood is carrying an enormous mass of rock and ice, when a river changes course, or when one mountain hazard triggers another.

For decades, engineering risk assessments have often relied on historical records. But history becomes a less reliable guide when the physical conditions producing disasters are changing.

A river that flooded once every several decades may no longer behave according to the same pattern. A glacier that appeared stable from satellite imagery may sit beneath an increasingly unstable slope. A lake that was considered remote may suddenly become a threat to a road, village or power plant hundreds of metres below.

The border problem

There is another complication that no satellite can solve on its own.

Borders.

The Himalayas are divided among countries with different political systems, security concerns and approaches to sharing information. But rivers do not stop at international boundaries. Neither do floods.

The August disaster reached the Nepal-China border and damaged the Gyirong crossing, an important trade and pilgrimage route. The disaster also raised questions about how quickly information about hazards in high mountain areas can move between countries.

This is where regional cooperation becomes more than a diplomatic slogan, experts say. A sensor positioned in one country can provide warning to people in another. A satellite image collected over one mountain range can reveal a developing hazard that threatens a valley downstream. A river gauge can provide critical information before floodwaters reach a settlement.

The technical capability already exists in many cases. The missing piece is often the architecture connecting it.

A 2026 assessment of Himalayan disaster risks has argued for stronger monitoring, early-warning systems and regional coordination because hazards are increasingly interconnected.

The idea is simple: Information about a mountain hazard should not stop at the same line where a political boundary begins.

From Nepal to Sikkim to Kashmir

The August disaster in Nepal isn’t a tragedy belonging to one country, point out experts.

The Kashmir Himalayas study has already identified lakes capable of producing destructive outburst floods and has warned of cascading processes.

Northeast India’s Sikkim provides another example.

After the 2023 South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood killed dozens and damaged major infrastructure, India expanded monitoring and mitigation efforts.

Today, 40 high-risk glacial lakes have been identified in Sikkim, including 16 placed in the highest-risk category, with authorities working on drainage, flood-retention and other protective measures.

But the lesson from each disaster is broadly the same: Waiting for a disaster to prove the risk is the most expensive form of preparedness.

The Third Pole test

The Himalayas are sometimes called the Third Pole because they contain one of the world’s largest concentrations of snow and ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic.

Major Asian rivers depend on water originating in these mountains. Hundreds of millions of people live downstream.

That makes the changing Himalayas not only an environmental issue but a security, infrastructure and humanitarian one.

The August disaster demonstrated the most frightening version of that future. A mountain can collapse without warning. A river can become a weapon of debris. A hydropower tunnel can become a trap. A border crossing can disappear in minutes. And by the time people downstream understand what is happening, the water may already be there.

It’s a future that a region stretching from northeast India, spanning Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir and Pakistan, can no longer ignore. Yet disaster management remains largely divided by national boundaries. That contradiction is becoming harder to navigate.

The next glacial collapse could begin in Kashmir. It could begin in Pakistan’s high mountains. It could begin in Sikkim, Nepal or Tibet.

Wherever it starts, the same question will follow the mountain downstream: Who knew, how early did they know, and did the warning reach the people in time?

For a region entering an era of increasingly complex mountain hazards, that may be the real measure of whether the Third Pole is prepared.

Magdalena Andersson will likely face several challenges as she tries to get Sweden’s other left-wing parties to unite.

Sweden’s opposition leader has officially begun talks to form a coalition government after the country’s left-wing bloc won a slim majority in last week’s election.

Magdalena Andersson, leader of the centre-left Social Democrats, was asked by Parliament Speaker Andreas Norlen on Friday to begin efforts to form a new government.

Norlen’s request follows the resignation of centre-right Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who stepped down on Thursday after the general election result was confirmed.

“I have now been tasked with exploring the possibility of forming a government. A task I undertake with great humility and will act constructively to put together a new government,” Andersson said in a statement posted on Instagram.

“My approach to the work that is now taking place is that all political forces now need to put party tactics aside and put Sweden and the Swedish people first.”

Andersson will likely face a series of challenges as she tries to persuade Sweden’s other left-wing parties to unite and form a new administration. The left-wing bloc won 176 of Parliament’s 349 seats in last week’s vote, securing a razor-thin majority of three seats.

Andersson is expected to seek the support of three other left-wing parties: the Greens, the Centre Party and the Left Party.

The socialist Left Party says Andersson will have to award some of its MPs cabinet posts to win their support. However, the liberal Centre Party insists it will not support such a government.

Andersson has until September 28 to form a government. If she fails, Kristersson, whose centre-right bloc won 173 seats, will try to form a coalition.

Coalition and minority governments are common in Sweden because the country has two major left- and right-wing blocs, both of which contain four parties.

The process of forming a government following the 2022 election took more than a month.

Nepal is demanding “climate justice” and $20m in compensation after the recent devastating floods in the country and China’s Tibet region, which led to the deaths and disappearances of thousands of people.

The catastrophe, which scientists say was caused by the effects of climate change, was triggered when part of a mountain glacier collapsed and a torrent of water and mud flooded down into Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot regions, as well as into China’s Tibet region on August 26. More than 1,300 people have been confirmed dead and more than 5,000 remain missing.

“We are paying the ultimate price for a global crisis we did not create,” Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said last week.

“Support for Nepal should not be seen from an angle of aid or charity, but should be seen from the perspective of climate justice,” he told the AFP news agency.

On Monday, the country’s President Ramchandra Paudel made a similar demand during an address to the nation.

“I make a heartfelt appeal to the international community not only to listen to the voices of ecologically vulnerable countries, including Nepal, but also to take concrete and effective steps to ensure climate justice for them,” he said.

Nepal’s Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment have written a joint letter to the United Nations, which set up a fund to respond to loss and damage caused by climate change in 2022 in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, with a request for $20m in damages.

The UN’s Loss and Damage Fund is, however, facing a $2.8bn funding gap as it prepares to approve its first climate recovery projects.

‘Collective frustration’

Nepal’s leaders may have a point.

Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and generates most of its electricity from renewable sources of energy. Yet its geographical location in the Himalayas makes it particularly vulnerable to severe climate and weather events.

Last month’s catastrophic flooding in the country comes against a backdrop of rapid global warming and glacial loss across the Himalayas.

Glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain range – which spans Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan – lost ice 65 percent faster between 2011 and 2020 than during the previous decade.

Nepal’s glaciers, which are sandwiched between two major carbon emitters – India and China – have lost close to one-third of their ice volume in roughly three decades due to global warming, the United Nations said in 2023.

Tanuja Pandey, a Nepal-based climate activist and lawyer, said there is collective frustration behind Nepal’s demand for climate justice.

“People here feel the world often pays attention to Nepal only when a climate disaster becomes impossible to ignore. It is deeply painful to people here that global attention intensifies when headlines report thousands of people dead or missing and in the end, their suffering does not generate any urgency to fight climate change,” she told Al Jazeera.

Shreya KC, a 28-year-old Nepali climate activist, said there is profound anger and sadness among people in Nepal who say that they must no longer continue to suffer the impact of climate change, which, as they see it, other countries are responsible for.

“My hometown is in Solukhumbu in eastern Nepal,” the activist told Al Jazeera. “It is a district of mountains and is also home to the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, and my home is also downstream. After the glacial collapse happened two weeks ago, people in my region have realised that this can now happen anywhere in Nepal since the Himalayas are warming and glaciers are melting faster.”

While Nepal has been actively fighting climate change, Shreya KC said she herself has been involved in projects in the country that focus on clean hydropower generation, forestry and other such climate advocacy programmes.

“Because of other countries,” she said, “today Nepalis are the ones most impacted by climate change. So people want justice.”

Is there such a thing as ‘climate justice’?

According to preliminary estimates from Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, the country’s property, housing and infrastructure losses in the floods amount to some $2.56bn.

But claiming compensation under a notion of “climate justice” won’t be straightforward, according to Joyeeta Gupta, a professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam.

According to the United Nations, “‘climate justice’ is the moral and ethical principle that seeks to address the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable communities and future generations”.

“I define it as a system of justice where others’ perspectives are taken into account, and no harm is caused to others,” Gupta told Al Jazeera.

Nepal is a country that has very low emissions, she said, but is facing the brunt of climate issues which it never created. “That is reason enough for Nepal to claim climate justice,” she noted.

But, practically speaking, can it? In the pre-1990 period, there was a lot of discussion among nations about the need for large emitters to compensate those that would be harmed, Gupta noted. But soon after that, the term “compensation” disappeared from the agenda of international climate treaties, which turned more to discussions about providing assistance to developing countries that need to tackle climate change instead.

In a July 2025 advisory opinion on climate change, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that “all nations have binding legal duties under international law to prevent significant climate harm”.

The ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate change also says that states breaching their international climate obligations can be required to make full reparations, including financial compensation to “injured states” or countries impacted by climate change caused by the actions of other countries.

While the ICJ’s opinion is not legally binding, Gupta said, it is a statement in international law that could support Nepal’s government’s international appeal for climate justice and compensation.

‘No climate justice without internal justice’

Nepal’s rapper-turned-prime minister, Balendra Shah, is scheduled to travel to New York on September 22 to address the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 24. His country’s appeal for climate justice is expected to be a key part of his address.

For climate activist Shreya KC, while UN meetings and international conferences on climate change may hold some weight when it comes to discussing climate disasters, right now, what Nepal needs is money.

“So much of our money allotted for healthcare, education and to transition into a more developed nation is now being spent on fighting climate change. So countries who are causing emissions, especially from the global north, need to commit more money to the UN’s Loss and Damage Fund,” she said, adding that money from that fund should be disbursed to vulnerable communities in need, not as a loan but as compensation for bearing the brunt of climate change.

Pandey noted that this is not the first time a climate disaster has occurred in Nepal and said that the new government, which came into power in March this year on the back of Nepal’s Gen Z protests last year, has also failed to make climate a priority in its budget.

While it is a good sign that Nepali politicians are appealing for international climate justice, she said, they also need to address the country’s internal development model to fight climate change in the first place.

“There is no climate justice without internal justice within the country itself,” she said.

“I hope that even in our development, partners and investors stop treating climate resilience as an optional addition to development in Nepal just because we are economically vulnerable.

“Investing in Nepal without investing in sustainability is simply a bad investment.”

On Monday, Nepal declared a national day of mourning to remember the more than 1,300 people who are known to have died in last month’s catastrophic floods. Thousands more are still missing.

The country’s President Paudel used the opportunity to call on people to unite.

“This is not a time for division. Nor is it a time to blame one another or become entangled in political disputes and confrontation,” he said.

“This is a time to demonstrate national unity and solidarity. It is also a time for reconstruction, rehabilitation and economic recovery.”

But Gupta says Nepal’s biggest challenge right now is establishing a precedent for compensation for climate change-related disasters.

“It was recently a glacial collapse in the country, but soon, it will become a bigger issue as time goes on because the monsoon patterns will change, the sea level will rise,” she said.

As many other developing countries – notably island states that face being submerged altogether – are also likely facing similar climate change challenges, the damage could become huge.

“That is going to be a very big reason why many rich countries will probably be unwilling to pay compensation, because that would set a precedent for future issues,” Gupta said.

“But the issues countries like Nepal are facing are a very strong argument to try and convince the whole world to accelerate action to phase out fossil fuels and fight climate change.”

Country implements state of emergency in Sarawak’s Serian district after air pollution reaches ‘hazardous’ levels.

Malaysia has declared a state of emergency in a district in Sarawak state after haze caused by wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia increased air pollution to “hazardous” levels.

King Sultan Ibrahim “has consented to the declaration of emergency throughout Serian Division, Sarawak, following haze conditions that have reached air pollution levels hazardous to public health and safety”, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office said in a statement on Thursday.

The declaration followed a formal request from the Sarawak Disaster Management Committee after the region’s Air Pollutant Index reached levels warranting consideration of a local emergency.

Under the order, 647 schools in Serian will close from Monday until at least the end of next week, alongside government and private offices, plantations, construction sites and quarries, with only essential services continuing to operate.

The state’s disaster management authorities said a three-day cloud-seeding operation launched on Thursday would be extended to at least Monday, citing forecasts of “more conducive cloud formations” during that period.

Sarawak State Disaster Management Committee chairman Douglas Uggah Embas, speaking at a news conference in Kuching, stressed that the emergency applied only to Serian, not the entire state, but urged residents there to take the situation seriously.

“Please minimise outdoor activities and avoid strenuous activities outdoors,” he said.

Sarawak, in the northern part of Borneo island, has been heavily affected by haze for weeks, as have the neighbouring states of Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia.

Other Southeast Asian countries like Brunei have also reported smoggy conditions. Singapore announced it would start providing daily haze advisories from Friday evening, after the 24-hour air quality readings entered the unhealthy range, the first since 2023.

It has also hit the Philippines, where President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ordered the suspension of classes in the capital region, Metro Manila, as well as more than a dozen provinces on Friday.

This year’s transboundary haze, which originates from fires burning across Indonesia, particularly the Kalimantan region and Sumatra island, is part of a wider seasonal wildfire crisis in the archipelago country.

Scientists say temperatures are expected to peak this month, potentially intensifying the fires by bringing hotter and drier conditions across the region.

Families in Nepal held symbolic funerals for relatives who remain missing, hoping to free their souls after they were presumed dead.

In Hindu tradition, cremation is a vital final rite, and for some families, performing the ceremony without the bodies of their loved ones has brought a measure of spiritual release.

Authorities in Nepal have meanwhile been burying recovered bodies in temporary graves until they can be identified. DNA samples are being preserved, distinguishing facial features photographed and other identifying details recorded to help match the remains with missing people and eventually return them to their families.

The August 26 flash flood has been one of the deadliest disasters to hit the Himalayan nation in recent years.

More than 1,200 people were killed and about 4,750 remain missing in Nepal and China’s Tibet region, after a huge wave of mud and debris destroyed towns, roads, bridges and several hydropower dams.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Smoke from forest and peatland fires burning across Indonesia has pushed air quality in parts of Malaysian Borneo to hazardous levels, triggering a surge in respiratory illness and forcing the cancellation of outdoor Independence Day celebrations.

The smoke – drifting from fires in Kalimantan in the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo – has settled over the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the same island, for much of August. It has also reached peninsular Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore.

It is the region’s worst haze episode since 2015, when fires in Indonesia exposed tens of millions of people to toxic smoke and caused more than 500,000 people to suffer respiratory ailments.

On Tuesday, six areas in Sarawak recorded hazardous air quality, with readings above 300 on Malaysia’s Air Pollutant Index. Anything above 100 is considered unhealthy. In Kuching, the state capital, the index hit 407, while in Serian, a town close to the Kalimantan border, it hit 408.

Mia Emylia Hassan, 33, a mother of two in Kuching, said the smell of smoke was inescapable.

“The air here is very thick,” she said. “It smells like smoke, and it’s just white all over.” Visibility from her house, she said, had dropped to about a kilometre, or roughly half a mile. “We have not seen blue sky for over a month,” she said.

The haze arrived in early August, shortly after her 10-month-old daughter came home from the hospital after a lung infection. “She’s not healing properly because her lungs are still developing,” Hassan said. “She’s been on medication this whole month, and she has been coughing and vomiting.”

Twice, the family has had to rush the infant back to the emergency room because she could not breathe.

“It’s a mini heart attack for us every time,” Hassan said.

Asthma cases surge

Malaysia’s Ministry of Health has reported a sharp rise in illness nationwide. During the week of August 23 to 29, asthma cases climbed to 1,811, up from 219 the previous week, the ministry said on Saturday, while conjunctivitis cases also rose to 720, from 146.

In peninsular Malaysia, Karen-Michaela Tan, an asthma patient who lives near the capital, Kuala Lumpur, said that a week after the haze thickened, she was “wheezing audibly” and “breathless when climbing stairs”. The 52-year-old said she needed two nebuliser treatments back to back to stop the wheezing, along with a heavy dose of steroids.

“Doctors are erring on the side of caution when it comes to asthma patients, choosing to up dosages rather than risk a patient being hospitalised for shortness of breath,” she said.

Her house is sealed, and two purifiers run continuously. Still, “I battle throat scratchiness and nasal dryness even with these measures”, she said.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional bloc, has activated a Level 3 transboundary haze alert – its highest – for the southern part of the region. The alert signals a high risk of severe cross-border haze. ASEAN cited an increase in fire hotspots and prolonged dry weather, fuelled by an intensifying El Nino weather pattern.

The toxic smoke has forced Sarawak to cancel its outdoor Independence Day celebrations on Monday, and officials warned that worse restrictions could follow. Any area where readings cross 500 will be placed under a local emergency, and all public and private offices will be closed, the deputy premier, Douglas Uggah Embas, told reporters. “Only essential services will be allowed to operate,” he added.

In Kuala Lumpur, where skies were grey for most of the month, the haze thinned enough to reveal blue sky for the first time in a week, just as the Independence Day parade got under way early in the morning.

Schools, too, have been hit hard. Under Ministry of Education rules, outdoor activities are suspended when the index reaches 100, and schools must close at 200. On August 20 and 21, nearly 600 schools in and around Kuching shut, affecting some 200,000 primary and secondary students. And on August 28, 30 more schools in Sarawak closed, keeping more than 4,000 children at home.

This week, schools are closed for the Independence Day holiday.

Youth sport has been affected, too. Yap Kai Jinn, 31, a coach at Square One Football, a Kuala Lumpur academy, said the club had cancelled all training sessions and matches since last week.

“Along with our parents, we decided that it is not healthy; it is not safe for our players to play under these conditions,” he said. “For now, we are looking for an enclosed area to do sessions, and for outdoor, we have to wait and hope that the weather gets better.”

Fires surge in West Kalimantan

The toll of the haze has been far heavier in Indonesia.

The country’s deputy health minister, Dante Saksono Harbuwono, told reporters on Monday that some 13,500 people were treated for respiratory infections in July and August, while about 5.5 million people on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra have been directly exposed to smoke.

Borneo is the world’s third-largest island and is divided between Indonesia, which controls the southern two-thirds as Kalimantan; Malaysia, whose states of Sarawak and Sabah run along the north; as well as the sultanate of Brunei.

According to the Indonesian government, fires between January and July burned more than 200,000 hectares (about 494,000 acres), an area three times the size of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, across Borneo and Sumatra. Nearly 95,000 hectares (about 235,000 acres) burned in July alone.

And despite efforts to control the blazes, the fires continue to surge in parts of Indonesian Borneo.

Hotspots in West Kalimantan nearly doubled on Monday, rising by 3,553 to 7,377, while the number of active fires rose by 88 to 104, and visibility fell below a kilometre, said Berton Panjaitan, an official at Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency. In Central Kalimantan, hotspots declined by 147 to 5,244, while fire spots increased by 16 to 72, he said.

Cities in Kalimantan have recorded hazardous air, too.

Readings in Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan reached 780 on Monday on the air quality index used by IQAir, a Swiss company that monitors pollution data. Pontianak in West Kalimantan reached 593.

The fires are largely set on purpose, analysts say, with plantation companies and smallholders alike burning rainforest and carbon-rich peatland to clear ground for palm oil, farming, and pulp and paper production. The practice is illegal, and Indonesian police said last week that they had arrested 72 people suspected of setting recent fires.

Super El Nino

Researchers warned people in Southeast Asia to brace for a long fire season.

El Nino – the naturally occurring pattern that shifts winds, air pressure and rainfall worldwide – appears headed for “super” strength, said Helena Varkkey, a specialist on transboundary haze at Universiti Malaya.

In Southeast Asia, she said, “the intensifying El Nino means hotter and drier conditions”, so “any fires that happen will have a bigger and longer regional impact”.

Jayaprakash Muralitharan, a Malaysian atmospheric scientist, said the worst was still ahead.

Haze conditions are “going to be severe and longer, because the hot weather started much earlier last year”, he said. “El Nino came in and made conditions drier. Now you have the extreme drying of the peatland.”

And peat can make fires stubborn, he said. What looks extinguished on the surface can smoulder underground for weeks and flare up again, and nothing short of sustained rain will soak the soil enough to put it out.

Until the rains arrive, Muralitharan said, there is little to be done.

“Human intervention now is only a temporary solution. It would go on until end of September or October when the rain comes in. I hope that rain comes in by then.”

Wheat prices have risen sharply amid disruptions to Black Sea exports as the Russia-Ukraine war continues and as changing weather patterns cause droughts that have sharply reduced production.

Over the past month, Russia and Ukraine have stepped up attacks on each other’s grain terminals on the Black Sea. With Russia the world’s largest wheat exporter, and Ukraine among the top 10 grain-producing countries, these attacks have taken their toll on global wheat and grain supply.

Chicago wheat futures, the global benchmark for the grain market, hit a three-year high on Friday, before nudging down 0.54 percent on Monday to $7.79 per bushel by 02:00 GMT. Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region called a state of emergency on Friday after announcing that port closures and navigation disruptions in the Sea of Azov and Black Sea basin have led to a pile-up of agricultural products at farms.

Meanwhile, the rising temperatures and lack of rain have threatened to cut this year’s wheat harvest in South Africa’s Swartland, which produces about 20 percent of the country’s wheat.

Here’s what we know:

What impact is the Russia-Ukraine war having on prices?

Over the past month, strikes on ports, vessels and grain facilities amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict have disrupted grain terminals and forced shippers to delay or cancel cargo loadings during the peak export season.

While Russian missile attacks have impacted Ukraine’s grain exports, Ukraine’s drone attacks in the Sea of Azov have also sharply curtailed Russian shipments of both grain and wheat. At the same time, attacks on Russia’s Novorossiysk and Taman ports have increased shipping costs out of its Black Sea ports.

According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Infrastructure, in July, Ukraine suffered 35 Russian attacks on vessels in port, 22 at sea and 67 on port facilities. By comparison, the total number of vessel strikes for the whole of 2025 was just 14.

On Friday, Kyiv’s agricultural minister said recent Russian air attacks have destroyed around 90 percent of retailers’ food logistics. With transport of wheat curtailed, prices have risen, raising fears of food insecurity around the world.

Joe Glauber, a research fellow emeritus in the director general’s office at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that the issue, therefore, is less the amount of wheat being produced and more about the cost of getting it to buyers and consumers.

“There’s plenty of wheat in Russia and Ukraine, and ultimately that wheat will make it out on to the market. But right now it can’t, or it comes out with a very high cost, and so wheat prices have reflected that,” he told Al Jazeera.

“There’s a lot of wheat in the world…it’s not a question of availability, it’s a question of affordability,” he added.

Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, usually spends around $3bn per year on importing wheat. In the first half of 2026, it sourced more than 82 percent of its stock from Russia and Ukraine.

In Asia, second-largest wheat importer Indonesia bought $361m of wheat from Ukraine and $102m from Russia between 2023 and 2024, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Indonesia usually sources between 15 percent and 20 percent of its wheat from the two countries.

An official at Indonesia’s Flour Millers’ Association told Reuters last week that current stocks can meet immediate food-grade wheat requirements. “But we don’t have abundant or excess supply. We have to look at other origins such as Bulgaria, Australia, Romania and Argentina for cargoes that do not get shipped from Russia and Ukraine,” the official said.

How does climate change fit into this?

Besides the war in Ukraine, droughts and drier weather patterns have taken a toll on wheat production and contributed to rising prices.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), as of July 1, the US, also one of the biggest wheat exporters, is forecast to yield “46.7 bushels per acre, down 0.1 bushels from last month and down 8.2 bushels from last year’s average yield of 54.9 bushels per acre”.

“If realised, the United States yield would be the lowest since 2015,” the USDA said.

In a report updated on August 14, the department wrote: “This year’s small crop is a product of long-term decline in US wheat acreage and widespread drought impacts on HRW [Hard Red Winter wheat] production in the Great Plains States. Total wheat supplies are forecast down 13 percent from the previous year, with larger beginning stocks dampening the effect of the smaller crop.”

For Canada, the world’s sixth-largest wheat producer, the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service found that for the 2026-2027 production year, total production is forecast to be 34.6 million metric tons (MMT) – also 13 percent lower than the year before – due to reduced planted area and a return to lower-than-average yields.

Amid the heatwaves that have hit European countries over the past three months, wheat production in the bloc has also reduced. According to COCERAL, the European association of trade in cereals, oilseeds, rice, pulses, olive oil, oils and fats, animal feed and agrosupply, the excessive heat is expected to reduce grain crops in 2026 by around 9 million tonnes to 286 million tonnes.

In a report published in July, COCERAL said: “The weather has started to affect corn pollination in the southern half of France and in Hungary. More damage is expected from the forecast heat in other parts of the EU.”

The El Nino weather pattern is also expected to bring drier-than-usual conditions to the Southern Hemisphere this year, with South Africa and Australia expected to experience droughts as a result.

What can be done to mitigate all this?

While the Russia-Ukraine war continues, in July 2022, the year the war started, a Black Sea Grain Initiative was brokered to allow for the safe exports of grain, food and fertiliser from Ukrainian ports to stabilise and lower global food prices.

While that agreement held, more than 1,000 ships full of grain and other foodstuffs left Ukraine, according to the EU. However, Russia ended the agreement in July 2023.

The answer to the current crisis is far from easy, experts say.

Bringing prices down now would necessitate a major shift in war strategy by both Russia and Ukraine, while the impact of climate change could be mitigated by governments implementing policies including improving water management on farms through the use of reservoirs to support drought-affected crops and reduce the loss of production.

Moreover, Glauber explained, while alternative routes exist to ship out grain from Russia and Ukraine, they are costly, adding that a return to a possible Black Sea Grain Initiative “would help calm wheat markets a lot”.

One answer may be for other countries to step in.

According to Glauber, during the 2022 global grain price surge, other wheat producing countries such as India exported more to make up for shortages.

“India, for example, had record exports in 2022. It’s probably less likely this year, just because of El Nino and other other factors affecting them, but they could also provide more wheat. I think the world wheat market proved very resilient in 2022, and I expect we’ll see the same in in 2026,” he said.

Nepal’s rescue teams, aided by Chinese and Indian experts, are racing to save more than 900 workers believed to be trapped underground at hydropower projects hit by devastating flash floods.

Nepali officials said on Monday that the focus was on reaching the workers in about a dozen hydropower project tunnels blocked by mud and rock debris.

The unprecedented deluge of ice, rock, mud and debris on the Nepal-Tibet border on Wednesday – caused by a glacier collapse – has killed 903 people with 4,247 missing in Nepal, its disaster authority said.

The flood also wreaked havoc across the border in China’s Tibet region, where at least 16 people died and 546 are missing, said Chinese authorities.

‘Big challenge’

Pictures and videos shared by rescue teams in Nepal showed earth-moving equipment digging and shovelling mud and rocks under lights in the dark of the night as workers watched. Soldiers used torchlights in a big pit they had created to look for space to get into one tunnel.

“A large amount of debris has been deposited and that is posing us a big challenge to open the tunnels,” Nepal army spokesperson, Raja Ram Basnet, told the Reuters news agency.

“Our main focus is on opening the tunnels.”

Hundreds of bodies, many unidentified, have been buried in shallow graves as they began decomposing in the humid weather after being swept down the mountains by the torrent.

At a hospital in the capital of Kathmandu, morgues have reached capacity and families are flocking to other hospitals in hopes of finding missing loved ones, reported Al Jazeera’s Minelle Fernandez.

In addition to the 933 missing hydropower workers, some 500 workers from the Truck and Container Association are also missing, said Fernandez.

The Red Cross has estimated that more than 90,000 people are likely to have been affected by the disaster, which China has linked to the effects of climate change.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah said the flood was an “unprecedented and devastating natural disaster” and it remained challenging to compile a complete assessment of the damage.

“Despite the adverse weather, difficult terrain and continuing risks, we are moving forward with determination to save the lives of our citizens,” he said in a Facebook post late on Sunday, adding that nearly 21,000 security personnel were involved in rescue operations, besides civilian workers and volunteers.

While accessibility has been restored on many roads and highways, almost “40 kilometres of roads have been absolutely swept away”, Al Jazeera’s Fernandez said.

“So there are challenges on the ground in getting this aid to communities, but the authorities, as well as the agencies and their networks are working their way through it.”

China sends experts, aid

China’s state-run CCTV said the government has mobilised more than 2,100 rescue workers and allocated at least 220 million yuan ($33mn) to support relief efforts. Equipment and supplies have been airdropped to frontline rescuers, while Chinese soldiers used life-detection equipment to look for the missing.

Beijing said 261 foreign nationals from 23 countries were unaccounted for in Tibet.

“President Xi Jinping, according to state media, has called for all out efforts to rescue those missing in the mudslide, and this is the second time that the president has made such a call,” said Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing.

“So this seems to be the Chinese leader’s effort to call on people, not only to continue their efforts, but redouble their efforts even as things are looking grimmer and grimmer.”

China has sent nine tunnel rescue experts to Nepal and shared satellite information with Nepalese authorities, said Yu.

Although Nepal has said it does not need foreign help in general search and rescue efforts, it has accepted help from giant neighbours India and China for their expertise in tunnel rescue.

Rescue operations have been suspended several times since Friday because of bad weather and concerns that a lake, formed across the Nepal-China border by the disaster, could trigger new flooding after it began overflowing into Nepal’s rivers.

The weather was good on Monday and rescue work continued to pick up pace, said Narendra Pariyar, the district administrator of Rasuwa, one of the two hard-hit districts.

Coral reefs make up just 1 percent of ocean coverage, but host a quarter of all life in the sea.

Coral reefs are experiencing bleaching events so frequently that they no longer have time to recover before the next one strikes, scientists have warned.

Global coral cover is now well below ⁠normal levels and at risk of irreversible decline, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) said in a report released on Monday.

“If we give them enough time, they ‌have the capacity to recover,” lead author Manuel Gonzalez Rivero said. “But we haven’t seen that amount of time being allowed. In fact, the frequency of those bleaching events has pretty much doubled.”

Bleaching occurs when corals expel the colourful algae living in their tissues. Without this algae, they become vulnerable to starvation and disease. Bleached coral are not dead, but they need time in cooler water to recover.

“We had 40 years of coral cover around the world that had remained relatively unchanged until 2010,” said Gonzalez Rivero, a scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “Since 2010, there has ⁠been a very steep change.”

The latest bleaching in 2023 was the most extensive on record, impacting 77 percent of the world’s coral reef areas.

Rivero warned that another such event is “very likely” this year given elevated temperatures globally.

Coral reefs are critical barometers for global ocean health, supporting more than 25 percent of all marine life despite covering less than 1 percent of the ocean floor.

The GCRMN’s warning came as organisers of the annual Pacific Islands Forum announced that at least five leaders of the 18-nation group will skip the group’s summit.

The forum has been touted for decades as a symbol of regional unity, and is used to discuss pressing matters facing Pacific states, including climate change and ocean health.

Nepal and China have paused rescue efforts for survivors of the devastating flash flood that hit the border region two days ago as a “barrier lake” formed during the disaster began to overflow.

Chinese rescue teams and vehicles were forced to pull back to safe ground, state broadcaster CCTV reported, as the risk of the lake bursting rose. Nepalese authorities also paused search operations for 90 minutes, an army officer confirmed.

The “barrier lake”, formed as Wednesday’s flash flood carried huge volumes of mud and debris down a steep valley, is threatening to unleash another huge and destructive wave.

In Nepal’s Rasuwa district, on the border with Tibet, residents were seen scrambling up hillsides to escape potential surges in the river level, according to the Reuters news agency.

The disaster unfolded as a glacier collapsed and sent a huge torrent of ice, water, rock, and mud down Himalayan river valleys, burying entire villages and destroying roads, bridges, and hydropower plants.

In its wake, leftover debris trapped water to form a barrier lake, a natural dam created when landslides block a river.

With water continuing to pour into the lake, the threat to downstream communities of another wave of flooding is rising.

China has deployed an engineering team to conduct aerial surveys and 3D modelling of the site. By Friday, the lake’s volume had swelled to more than 2.5 million cubic metres, up from the estimated 1.5 to 2 million cubic metres recorded just a day earlier.

Downstream in Nepal, officials received warnings that the lake had begun breaking its bank, according to Narendra Pariyar, the top administrator in the hard-hit Rasuwa district.

“We can see that the level of water in the river is rising,” he said, adding that the exact height of the surge remains unclear.

Relief supplies blocked

The death toll from the disaster has surpassed 470. On Friday, the Nepalese prime minister’s office reported 469 confirmed deaths, with 977 people still missing. About 1,550 people have been rescued.

Chinese authorities reported on Friday that the death toll in Tibet has now risen to at least five, with 558 missing.

Bishal Nath Upreti, president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management, told Al Jazeera that conditions are “extremely difficult” for those trapped in the disaster zone, as destroyed roads have left them completely cut off.

So far, about 800 people have been rescued by helicopter and 700 by land, with airlifts delivering vital aid to survivors.

Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said the number of missing is expected to rise. China has deployed about 500 military and paramilitary personnel and sent Premier Li Qiang to supervise operations on the ground, while Nepal has deployed 30,000 security personnel to search remote, cut-off valleys, she said.

More ⁠than ⁠90,000 people are estimated to have been affected ⁠by disaster, the ⁠Red Cross said on Friday, adding that the delivery of relief supplies has been blocked by the overflowing lake.

“We’re of course very concerned about the secondary flood,” said David Fisher, head of delegation ⁠for the International Federation ⁠of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in ⁠Nepal.

Six people in critical condition as a severe heatwave fuels 154 wildfires across Algeria in a single day.

At least 12 people have been killed and 54 others injured as wildfires ravaged parts of northeastern Algeria, an official said, as authorities evacuated dozens of families from the hardest-hit areas.

Minister of Interior Said Sayoud, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said the deaths occurred in the provinces of Jijel, Bejaia and Tizi Ouzou.

“Five deaths were recorded in the prefecture of Jijel, four in that of Bejaia and three in that of Tizi Ouzou,” he said.

Sayoud made the remarks during a visit to a hospital in the city of Souk El Thenine in Bejaia to evaluate treatment for victims suffering burn injuries and smoke inhalation.

According to the official Algeria Press Service, Sayoud reported 54 burn cases at the hospital, including six people who were in critical condition.

Sayoud said Civil Protection teams recorded 154 fire outbreaks across the country on Wednesday, including 36 in Bejaia province, 18 of which had been brought under control.

The fires come as a severe heatwave sweeps across Algeria and neighbouring Tunisia.

Sayoud said firefighting teams have managed to contain the blazes in the provinces of Skikda, El Tarf, Bouira, Tizi Ouzou and Tebessa. Operations were still under way in Bejaia, where 18 hotspots remained active, and in Jijel, where fires were burning in 12 municipalities.

He added that dozens of families had been evacuated from areas affected by the fires.

Images broadcast by regional news website Jijel News showed residents seeking refuge in a post office amid thick smoke.

Algeria frequently endures deadly seasonal wildfires during peak summer months.

At least six people were killed last month alone.

In recent years, intense heatwaves and fierce winds have amplified fire risks across the country’s forested Mediterranean coastline, disasters exacerbated by drought and climate change.

Assam, India – Debiram Panika, a 37-year-old daily wage labourer from northeastern India’s Assam state, would speak to his wife and two daughters on video calls every day from Dimapur, a town in neighbouring Nagaland state where he worked.

But when his phone rang at about 11am on July 19, there was panic in the voice of his 30-year-old wife, Dipika.

“I could only see my wife telling me on the video call, ‘This is it for us. We are going to die,’ before the call was disconnected,” Panika recalled, speaking to Al Jazeera.

It was the last time they spoke. Moments later, rising waters from the nearby Dikhow River, which snakes past their village in Assam’s Sivasagar district, surged into their bamboo-and-mud home with a ferocious current and swept away Dipika and four-year-old daughter Radhika.

“The water came flooding like sea waves, and they were gone in a flash,” Panika said, as he stood in front of the ruined home he has since returned to.

Sivasagar is part of the eastern Assam region, also referred to as Upper Assam. Incessant rains between July 18 and July 20 submerged the region and the neighbouring Naga Hills of Nagaland.

Monsoon floods usually impact northern and western Assam, and parts of central Assam, the worst. But several Nagaland districts bordering Upper Assam received heavy rainfall on those three days, leading to dozens of landslides. This intense run-off swelled Naga Hills-origin rivers and caused devastation downstream.

The resultant floods killed more than 100 people, destroyed 2,700 villages, and displaced 700,000 people across the state. The state government says 1.2 million people were impacted in all, their lives disrupted.

Most waters have since receded, but Radhika’s body is yet to be found.

“I look for Radhika every day in the bushes, tirelessly,” Panika said, holding back his tears. “Her last words, calling me ‘Papa’, are still reverberating in my ears.”

Panika’s other daughter, Ridhika, 10, was at a relative’s place a few metres away when her mother and sister were swept away by the flood. Ridhika held onto a bamboo bush and was later rescued by locals.

‘Apocalyptic event’

Several riverine villages in Sivasagar have been wrecked by debris carried down by the waters of the Dikhow from the surrounding Naga Hills.

Tens of thousands of tree trunks lie piled up in places that used to be homes, as lush rice fields, the main source of livelihood, have been washed away.

Kukil Das, a 30-year-old Facebook vlogger in Debiram’s village of Nepali Khuti, told Al Jazeera that “the torrent of the flood was like an apocalyptic event seen in the movies.

“Trees as tall as 30 to 40 metres (100-130ft) came down from the hills, flooding the river, and wiped out everything as they crashed against our homes,” he said. “There is no home left. It was a tsunami.”

Das and his friend Shravan Prasad, from the neighbouring Bihubor village, said they saved at least 1,000 lives by using boats the two villages had at that time.

“We put together a group of friends with the seven boats and started rescuing people turn by turn for two days and nights without food and water,” Prasad said.

Das said the floods forced residents to take shelter on the roofs of concrete homes they could find, as cries for help and the sounds of the river washing away homes echoed in the neighbourhood.

Laxmi Sharma, who owned one such concrete house, said she provided shelter to at least 60 people on her terrace after the river water gushed into Nepali Khuti.

“People ran towards the roof of my building. We thought we were going to die,” Sharma, 46, told Al Jazeera. “But it is a miracle that we are still alive even though my house was barely out of water.”

Not everyone could escape the flood’s wrath, though.

In Sivasagar’s Simaluguri village, two friends – Reihana Ahmed, a Muslim, and Ratul Swarna, a Hindu, both in their 30s – were swept away in the torrent.

When Ahmed, a mother of two, was drowning as the deluge entered her village, Swarna, who did not know how to swim, jumped to save her without thinking about his life.

The two friends were later found dead in the paddy fields. “It was humanity that won in a disaster like this,” Ahmed’s husband Aminul Haque said with a sorrowful smile.

‘Human-made flood’

Besides the eroding banks of the Dikhow River in Prajabasti, another flood-affected village, 75-year-old Asor Ali sat in disbelief next to his wife, Jamila Khatun.

“Even the generations preceding me have not seen a flood like this,” he said, staring at the flowing river. “Even the 1950s earthquake that triggered the floods here did not do so much damage.”

A magnitude 8.6 earthquake hit Assam and Tibet across the border in 1950, altering the region’s riverine system. Nearly 5,000 people died. Since then, Assam has witnessed frequent floods, which intensify during the monsoons, says Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher on the basin of the Brahmaputra, the region’s major river: The Naga Hills rivers that flooded Upper Assam are its tributaries.

But residents say this year’s deadly deluge is not just a natural phenomenon.

Biren Gogoi, 43, says rampant stone and sand mining in regional rivers, coupled with aggressive deforestation and coal extraction in Nagaland’s Mon district, triggered the devastation.

Global Nature Watch, an open-source online platform that provides real-time data on deforestation across the world, showed that Nagaland lost 14 percent of its tree cover between 2002 and 2025, with Mon district bordering Assam’s Sivasagar being the most affected.

According to the latest report published in 2023 by the Forest Survey of India, Nagaland has lost about 794.88 square kilometres (306.9 square miles) of forest cover between 2013 and 2023.

Al Jazeera travelled along the Assam-Nagaland border and saw signs of deforestation on the hills and mining activities in both the states. Satellite images also confirmed rampant coal mining in Nagaland’s Mon district, and stone mining crushers on Assam’s side, especially in Bihubor, one of the epicentres of the Assam flood.

While Mon’s Deputy Commissioner Wennyei Konyak acknowledged the possibility of illegal mining in the district, he added that the land was protected under Indian laws to uphold the rights of Indigenous tribes, and therefore government interference in the area was limited.

“I would not blame mining activities for the flood. It was just the wrath of nature,” he told Al Jazeera.

But experts and political leaders in Assam say mining played a direct role in the floods.

Debabrata Saikia of the opposition Congress party, who is the legislator from Sivasagar constituency, accused Assam’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of allowing illegal excavations for stone and sand on the Dikhow riverbank, resulting in a cratered wasteland that worsened the floods.

“This unchecked plundering of riverbeds and hills under the ruling government has engineered this into a man-made disaster,” Saikia told Al Jazeera.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, however, rejected the allegation on August 4, blaming excessive rainfall in Nagaland for triggering the Upper Assam deluge. On August 14, Ranoj Pegu, a cabinet minister in the state’s BJP government, blamed erratic rainfall due to climate change for the deluge.

Rahman, the Brahmaputra river basin researcher, believes that while the climate crisis played a role, the flood was “purely human-made”, caused by the fracturing of the landscape.

“The unrestrained stone extraction from the Dikhow riverbed has damaged the river’s natural cushion,” Rahman said. “That means the river loses the capacity to resist high flows of torrents that break embankments and cause floods.”

An official document from 2022, seen by Al Jazeera, also highlights mining as a factor in possible large-scale floods downstream on the Assam side.

Al Jazeera reached out to senior district officials in Sivasagar as well as state government officials for their comments on allegations of unchecked coal mining but did not get any response.

Back in Prajabasti village, Ali, the septuagenarian, is mentally preparing himself for future floods.

“It will happen again, so long as there is greed for land and coal in humans,” he said. “Nature pays them back.”