News Feeds

• Enforcing traffic laws is all well and good, but when cities rely on ticket revenue to fill the government’s coffers, it erodes trust in police and takes away resources from preventing or solving other crimes. (Governing)
• A rail consultant says that a national railroad infrastructure bank could bring together federal, state and private sector resources to build high-speed rail. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Planner Mark R. Brown argues that most public hearings about transportation are unnecessary or even downright counterproductive — a relic of bad decisions in the 1960s that now allow a vocal minority to kill good projects. (Car Free America)
• One upside of robotaxis is that they would make it a lot easier to implement congestion pricing. (Government Technology)
• Oregon is nowhere near meeting its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the Trump administration’s transportation policies and uncertain funding at the state level. (Capital Chronicle)
• WTSP pinpointed Tampa’s 10 deadliest roads.
• Jacksonville’s Skyway monorail is nearing the end of its useful life. What should replace it? (The Jaxson)
• Complete Streets improvements to Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive both reduced crashes and improved travel times. (NACTO)
• Crime dropped by two-thirds and revenue rose by $10 million a year after Bay Area Rapid Transit upgraded fare gates at train stations. (Mass Transit)
• Pittsburgh has started turning downtown’s Smithfield Street into a pedestrian-friendly corridor. (Post-Gazette)
• WUGA interviewed Athens, Georgia’s Vision Zero coordinator about the city’s new safety action plan.
• The Kansas City streetcar will turn into a rolling platform for live music, poetry and public art on Wednesday. (KCTV)
• The Doobie Brothers’ 1974 hit “Black Water” was written on a New Orleans streetcar. (Yahoo)
  
  

Bowen and AEMO celebrate new renewables record - first time above 80 pct in main grid - and the cheaper wholesale prices that came with it.

The post “More cheap, clean sovereign energy:” Bowen and market operator celebrate new renewables record appeared first on Renew Economy.

Victorian Labor says it will adopt the proposed federal Labor mandate and require future data centre developers to bring their own renewable energy and storage if re-elected in November.

The post Victorian Labor toes federal line on BYO renewables for data centres, Coalition still pushing gas appeared first on Renew Economy.

Powerful new wind turbine adds longer blades to reduce costs and boost output, and comes at critical time for the struggling Australian wind industry.

The post Global wind giant expects lower costs from new turbine equipped with extra-long blades appeared first on Renew Economy.

Windlab's John Martin on the project that broke the investment drought for big wind, and what makes the sector so hard. Plus: Victoria's disarray, EV milestones, and more.

The post The “impossible” wind project that broke the investment drought | Energy Insiders appeared first on Renew Economy.

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org; Mads Christensen is executive director of Greenpeace International; and Amitabh Behar is executive director of Oxfam International.

On Monday, global petitions with a collective total of more than 2 million signatures were presented to the United Nations, calling on governments to introduce binding mechanisms to make fossil-fuel companies and the super-rich contribute to the costs of the damage they have created.

The petition signatures were received by Selwin Hart, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Action, in New York during the UN General Assembly, sending a clear message to governments: there is no more room for excuses.

If governments are serious about resilience, energy security and protecting people from an increasingly unstable world, they must make the companies profiting from the fossil-fuel economy pay their fair share. Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels.

• Sep 22, 2026 News Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda Leaders highlighted the national security risks posed by global warming and fossil fuel dependency at New York Climate Week Read more
• Sep 21, 2026 News COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’ Turkish minister Murat Kurum said AI companies should be transparent about their energy use and power their data centres with clean energy Read more

For more than six months, the Strait of Hormuz, the channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed without a second thought, has been closed, contested or effectively unusable. Tankers sit at anchor. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof. Petrol pumps from Los Angeles to Lagos have felt the tremor. It has taken a war to remind the world just how much of our daily lives still rests on a single, fragile artery of fossil fuels.

At the other end of the same emergency, a glacier came down on the Nepal–China border in the last week of August. A wall of ice, rock and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Langtang valleys. It has been described as one of the deadliest disasters in the region’s modern history, unfolding in a landscape where the world’s glaciers are retreating and destabilising at a pace scientists have been warning about for years.

And this came only weeks after hundreds of thousands of people were displaced — not by ice, but by fire. Europe has experienced its worst wildfire season in more than a decade. Homes have been lost across Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and the UK. Firefighters and civilians have been killed battling the blazes, while damage and reconstruction costs continue to reach extraordinary levels.

These are not separate crises. They are different expressions of a world becoming more volatile, while the fossil-fuel economy continues to generate enormous profits for those at the top and pushes the costs onto everyone else.

Communities absorbing cost

Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels. One thread runs through all of these events: a global economy still organised around the profits of a fossil fuel industry that has known, for decades, exactly what it was doing to the planet.

At a moment when governments are gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly to talk about security, resilience and economic competitiveness, it is worth spelling out what “security” – or the lack of it, driven by our economy’s dependence on oil – actually means this year for ordinary people around the world: 35,000 excess deaths in Europe due to heat; the highest food prices in three and a half years; $700 billion in economic losses, threatening countless jobs and livelihoods, from a war and a closed oil chokepoint whose consequences are nowhere near over.

Meanwhile the companies that extracted, refined, shipped and sold the fuel behind all of this continue to report extraordinary profits. Households are paying more for energy. Governments are spending billions on disaster response, on reconstruction, on emergency deployments of firefighters and aid. Communities are absorbing the cost of a system they didn’t design and don’t control. We pay. They profit.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not inevitable. It is a political choice, repeated year after year, to let the companies most responsible for the climate crisis hoard the wealth they generate while the rest of us carry the risk.

Taxes and fines needed

That is why, together with communities and campaigners in dozens of countries have spent the last three years building the case for a simple, overdue idea: polluters should pay for the damage they have caused. Not through voluntary pledges or distant net-zero promises, but through binding mechanisms, climate damages taxes, surtaxes on fossil fuel profits, and fines ring-fenced for recovery and adaptation that put real money where the harm actually is. This is how we take the profit out of destruction and protect the generations to come.

The response has told us we are not alone in thinking this. Our petitions calling on governments to make polluters pay have now gathered a collective total of over 2 million signatures from people across every region of the world.

The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

That is not a fringe demand. It is what happens when people watch a choke-point war spike their fuel bill, watch a glacier take a thousand lives, watch their own summer holidays rearranged by fire. They draw the obvious conclusion: the people who caused this should be paying for it – not profiting from it.

We hear the objection already forming: that this is not the moment, with wars underway and economies fragmenting, to burden industry further. We would say the opposite is true. If governments can mobilise trillions for war, for bailouts and for new fossil fuel infrastructure, they can mobilise the political will to tax the companies that caused this crisis.

Money for clean energy and resilience

That money can go straight to the people paying for it, through cheaper, cleaner, more secure energy, and through funding for communities on the frontline of floods, fires and glacial collapse. There isn’t an excuse left. There is only a choice about where power and money go next. Every dollar we don’t spend now on adaptation, resilience and cutting emissions, we burn many times over later: on disasters we could have prevented and economies we scramble to fix too late.

This year’s UNGA should be the moment that choice gets made in public. Governments arriving in New York will talk about resilience, about energy security, about protecting their citizens from an unstable world. Let them explain on the record why a fossil fuel industry that has spent decades profiting from that instability should not be the one paying to fix it so wrecking the planet no longer pays off.

The fires, floods and storms won’t just go away. The system that keeps producing these disasters, and keeps paying the same companies for the privilege, will not change itself unless political leaders step up. It is on all of us to make sure they hear, as loudly as possible, that the time for excuses has run out.

The post After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people want action to make polluters pay appeared first on Climate Home News.

Grupo Temático de Energía y Alternativas Miembros * Carmen Aliaga * Franco Augusto * Rose Benedice Lawaetz * Matthew Burke * Raquel Castillo * Trimita Chakma * Alex Jensen * Madhuresh Kumar (Coord.) * Vasna Ramasar * Rebeca Roysen * Manthan Shripadvs

Energy and Alternatives Thematic Group Members * Carmen Aliaga * Franco Augusto * Rose Benedice Lawaetz * Matthew Burke * Raquel Castillo * Trimita Chakma * Alex Jensen * Madhuresh Kumar (Coord.) * Vasna Ramasar * Rebeca Roysen * Manthan ShripadalternativesalternativesGTAalternativesalternativesalternativesvsalternativesalternativesalternativesGTAweaversendorsersalternatives

Renters will be saddled with higher power bills if minimum energy efficiency standards stop at ceiling insulation and air conditioning, new modelling warns.

The post Weak rental energy efficiency standards could leave tenants saddled with higher power bills appeared first on Renew Economy.

Study finds increased precipitation outpaces water loss from warmer temperatures.

Tiny autonomous drones could soon navigate through darkness, dust and smoke using artificial whiskers inspired by animals.

Governments need to start addressing climate change impacts and nature loss as a threat to national security and manage shocks before they hit rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, Britain’s foreign minister and other leaders told the opening of Climate Week NYC on Monday.

Ed Miliband – who was until July the UK’s energy minister – said the growing urgency and severity of extreme weather and related disasters require a shift in thinking, calling on governments to put the issues “front and centre”.

“Climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers – the security community, not just the activist community, the generals, not just the green campaigner,” he told an audience of policy and business leaders.

There is a need to assess risk differently, he added, by embedding climate and nature in national security systems, threat assessments and contingency planning. He also urged countries to pool information because climate shocks can travel fast through supply chains as well as influencing financial markets and migration patterns. 

The framing of climate change as a threat to countries’ security and stability is not new, but it has gained greater emphasis as the impacts of global warming are biting harder in places like Europe, which is struggling with more intense heatwaves, drought and forest fires.

In mid-August, Miliband said in a social media post, reflecting on the UK’s hot and dry summer, that he would convene foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly in late September to discuss how to respond to “this new national security threat” and build a coalition for action. But he did not give further details of that initiative on Monday. 

• Sep 21, 2026 News COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’ Turkish minister Murat Kurum said AI companies should be transparent about their energy use and power their data centres with clean energy Read more
• Sep 18, 2026 News Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn Türkiye and Australia are pushing coal, oil and gas at home with no national timeline for their own fossil fuel phase-out Read more
• Sep 17, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier DR Congo’s power-hungry mining sector drives record solar surge As solar deployment rapidly accelerates across Africa, miners in the DRC are driving significant demand for clean energy to replace expensive diesel Read more

Australia calls for unified response

Other leaders in New York also reflected on the growing threat to their societies and economies from climate change impacts and exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country “understands the dangers of global warming and the urgency of climate action as well as any nation”.

“We have seen it up close – from increasingly intense bushfires and floods, to the damage warming oceans are wreaking on our vulnerable coastlines,” he said in a speech, adding that with a record-breaking El Nino forecast, Australia and Pacific nations are preparing for a potential summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.

With scientific forecasts of worsening impacts now coming to pass, “this means the global community cannot afford to be frozen in time as the world warms around us”, he added. People cannot be left to cope alone, he said, emphasising that as leaders, “we need to come together, to meet the problem head on”. 

Australia will lead the negotiations at the upcoming COP31 climate summit, and has brought the existential threat to Pacific countries from sea level rise into the diplomatic limelight. The pre-COP gathering next month will be hosted in Fiji, with a visit by leaders to Tuvalu.

Speaking to Climate Home News in New York, Panama’s environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said the small Central American country faces hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from drought in the Panama Canal due to El Niño.

The Panama Canal Authority estimates income could be reduced by between $225 million and $400 million due to slower maritime traffic passing through the strait.

“What a great irony,” Navarro said. “Panama being a small, carbon-negative country pays the price for the big carbon-emitting countries.”

UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband speaking at New York Climate Week. (Photo: The Climate Group) Climate investment “critical” to stability

Amina J. Mohammed, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, said there was a need for countries to stick with multilateral approaches to problems including climate change, despite the difficult geopolitical times the world is going through. She added, however, that it “does require your voices. It won’t happen by itself. We have to lean into it.” 

The rest of the high-level UNGA week in New York will show the extent to which multilateral efforts to resolve the world’s problems – from climate change to poverty – have top-level support as leaders give their speeches, including the Brazilian and US presidents on Tuesday.

Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics with think-tank E3G, said the statements by Miliband and other leaders at Climate Week NYC had underlined the political and government case to integrate climate considerations into security thinking and institutions at the highest level.  

“In a world of escalating climate impacts and the record El Niño expected to heighten risks worldwide alongside energy volatility and geopolitical tensions, investing in global climate resilience and the clean energy transition are critical to credible strategies to enhance stability and national security,” she added in a statement.

Suneeta Kaimal from the Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) said that, while in previous years governments heavily focused their speeches on climate action, this year’s focus on energy security does not change the underlying challenge. 

“The fact that the framing has changed from energy transition to energy security doesn’t change the reality that this transition needs to occur in energy systems. It’s just a different framework. It’s a more transactional framework, but it all points to the need for resilience,” she said.

Speaking at the opening session of Climate Week, Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described how her country had reacted to the spiralling costs it faced from the 1970s oil price crisis by investing in a large-scale district heating system fuelled instead by its abundant geothermal energy.

“Resilience wasn’t built while the crisis was happening. It was built in the years after – deliberately, patiently, as a national mission – so that the next shock wouldn’t hit as hard, if at all,” she said.

New COP goal on electrification

Speaking at a separate event on Monday, UN climate chief Simon Stiell pointed to a new voluntary target expected to be adopted at COP31 for 35% of global energy use to come from electricity by 2035 as a strategy that can help cushion countries, families and businesses from fossil fuel supply shocks and rising costs.

At the United Nations, the Turkish COP presidency gave more details of the electrification goal it first announced at the Bonn climate talks in June, including sharing with governments a final text of the pledge it wants them to get behind.

The pledge sets out a global ambition to advance electrification, highlighting the importance of supporting developing countries to identify their grid investment needs and access finance for electrification. 

“It is a development strategy, an industrial strategy, a health strategy, and a security strategy,” Stiell said.

The post Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda appeared first on Climate Home News.

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For Immediate Release:

September 21, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

SACRAMENTO — Today, the Delta Tribal Environmental Coalition (DTEC)—consisting of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, Little Manila Rising, and Restore the Delta— submitted comments on the updated San Francisco Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan (“Bay-Delta Plan”), a critical policy guiding water quality, river flows, and ecosystem protections for the state’s largest and most fragile estuary. 

The updated plan drew immediate opposition from the coalition for failing to make meaningful changes to address longstanding Tribal, environmental justice, and ecological concerns. 

“Protection of Tribal sovereignty and beneficial water uses cannot be achieved through approval of voluntary agreements that excluded tribes. This is the Board’s final opportunity to reverse course and do the right thing,” said Vice Chair Malissa Tayaba, Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.

Among DTEC’s central concerns is the plan’s reliance on Voluntary Agreements (VAs), privately negotiated deals allowing powerful water districts to offer limited flow commitments and funding in exchange for exemptions from stronger, enforceable regulatory requirements. 

Tribal, environmental justice, and conservation groups have raised concerns that the VA approach is not scientifically sound and does not provide enforceable protections needed to safeguard Delta ecosystems and communities. The framework has also faced growing uncertainty, with the Bureau of Reclamation and Westlands Water District threatening to withdraw.

“The update to the Bay-Delta Plan comes at one of the most crucial moments for our fragile Bay-Delta estuary, and yet the Plan once again fails to meet the moment. This latest iteration again seeks to move forward the inequitable and environmentally damaging voluntary agreements, which will only further ecosystem decline, harming communities, tribes, Delta economies, and fishing communities,” said Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs at Restore the Delta. “Swapping voluntary agreements for a regulatory backstop with minimum flow requirements misses the point – flows are habitat, and without adequate flows, fish populations will continue to decline, harmful algal blooms will proliferate, and our communities will suffer.” 

DTEC maintains that the State Water Board has failed to remedy deficiencies previously identified in the draft Plan. Among DTEC’s chief concerns are:

• Procedural violations, including advancing the updated plan while a federal Title VI investigation into discriminatory water management practices remains open.
• Discriminatory effects, including the omission of enforceable harmful algal bloom standards and meaningful instream flow requirements that could result in unlawful discriminatory effects on Tribes and communities of color.
• Failure to analyze the project as a whole and to base the environmental analysis on a stable project description, including how voluntary agreements would operate and the potential influence of major infrastructure operations that have not been accounted for.
• Failure to conduct government to government Tribal consultation required under AB 52.
• Public trust violations and unreasonable timelines that undermine meaningful public participation and effective protection of Delta resources. 

“After taking thirty years to update the Bay Delta Plan, the State Water Resources Control Board’s latest update will only further devastate fish populations, increase environmental damage, and cater to elite special interests through the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes (VAs) proposals. This is not a plan that protects beneficial uses for all Californians, it is a plan that kowtows to political pressure and elite special interests,” said Gary Mulcahy, Government Liaison with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. 

“The final update to the Bay-Delta Plan is another opportunity for the water board to honor public trust and stand for the protection of our natural resources against the interest of private governing bodies,” said Gloria Alonso Cruz, Environmental Justice Advocacy Coordinator with Little Manila Rising. “The VAs perpetuate the systemic inequities manifested across our landscapes, inequities that those with the least access to clean and safe waterways are too familiar with. The public must urge the board to renounce the VAs and instead pursue science-based solutions that demonstrate a real commitment to environmental justice over private interests.”

The State Water Board is scheduled to consider adoption of the updated Bay-Delta Plan at a hearing on October 28-29. Learn how you can make a public comment.

###

This is a re-post from World Weather Attribution

A catastrophic rock-ice avalanche that transitioned into a debris flood in the Himalayas along the Nepal–China border on 26 August 2026 has caused widespread destruction across Nepal and neighbouring regions. In Nepal, at the time of writing (14 September 2026) the disaster has resulted in over 1,300 confirmed deaths, with only a small fraction of victims identified and returned to their families. Over 5,000 people remain missing, around 13,700 people  have been rescued and more than 8,600 people have received medical treatment (NDRRMA, 2026e). About 3,400 people are currently sheltering in holding centres (NDRRMA, 2026a) and an estimated 84,270 people across 17 local levels in the six districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha, Chitwan and Tanahu are affected, with the government declaring 15 municipalities as disaster crisis-hit areas for three months (UNDP, 2026a; MOHA, 2026).

While initial reports suggested that the event may have been caused by an earthquake, later evidence indicates that the recorded seismic activity was actually linked to the rapid collapse of  roughly 2 square kilometers of  rock wall and glacier ice (US Geological Society Earthquake Hazards Program, August 26, 2026; Center for Hydrology and Water Resources Research, 2026). The collapsing material fell approximately 1,400 m, from around 5,150 m above sea level to the valley floor at about 3,750 m. This released a huge amount of energy and produced seismic waves that were initially detected as an earthquake-like signal.

The rock-ice avalanche then triggered a series of processes. As the ice, rock and debris moved rapidly down the mountain, friction and mechanical energy probably caused some of the glacier ice to melt, producing large amounts of meltwater (Le Page, 26 August 2026 [NewScientist]). When the avalanche reached the valley floor, it also hit buried ice, which probably melted and added more water to the debris flood.

Figure 1: Climate-sensitive processes potentially contributing to failure. Conceptual representation of the main mechanisms through which climate variability and climate change may have influenced the stability of the Rasuwa rock wall.  

The resulting debris flood was therefore likely caused by several sources of water, including melting glacier ice, water stored beneath the glacier and in permafrost, ice and water carried within the debris (see fig. 1), and river water pushed ahead of the flow. A wall of water, ice, rock and sediment reached the Rasuwagadhi border, 22 km downstream, within seven minutes, moving at an average speed of 188 km per hour, and wiped out the border facilities, the town of Timure and the Syabrubesi market town within the next quarter of an hour, catching pilgrims, border staff and hydropower workers (CHWRR, 2026; Lord, 2026). Within a further half hour it was in the Trishuli valley at Betrawati, and still moving boulders and pulling multi-storey buildings into the river in Betrawati and Trishuli Bazaar far downstream (CHWRR, 2026; Lord, 2026). The flood travelled 200 km to Devghat in under seven hours, where river flow more than doubled to about 5,850 cubic metres per second, and an estimated 20 million cubic meters of excess water passed in under four hours before the flood continued into India (CHWRR, 2026; Lord, 2026). The water deposited 30.5 million cubic meters of sediment and debris along the corridor, burying agricultural fields, settlements and hydropower plants (NDRRMA, 2026d).

This mixture of water, ice, rock and sediment created a highly destructive debris flood that swept away families, homes, settlements, roads, bridges and other infrastructure along the corridor, leaving survivors stranded and cut off, many having also lost family members and everything they owned more than 35 km downstream while the water travelled much further, at Glachi, 88 km downstream the water level of the river Trishuli rose by 8.5m (Center for Land Surface Hazards, 2026). The extent of the humanitarian catastrophe is still being assessed. 

Researchers from Nepal, Pakistan, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the US, New Zealand and the Netherlands, including experts in glaciology, mountain hydrology, climate science, humanitarian aid, seismology and social science, have come together to examine the range of factors that may have contributed to this event. While the underlying geological structure controlled where and how the slope failed, longer-term warming and changing precipitation phase from snow to rain may have reduced its stability by weakening ice-filled fractures and rock–ice contacts and increasing water pressure. Climate change is thus best understood as a destabilising factor acting on a pre-existing geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause of the failure. Therefore, rather than conducting a conventional attribution study which is typically focused on a single, well-defined weather event, we are bringing together the available scientific knowledge on known and potential drivers, while also investigating how these drivers have changed in a warming climate.

Main Findings 

• Nepal has established early warning systems and adaptation measures that can help reduce impacts from more conventional and forecastable riverine floods, and have demonstrably helped save lives, including among communities downstream. However, the event was fundamentally different in its magnitude, speed and complexity. It was beyond the design and predictive limits of existing risk reduction measures, and no existing early warning system could have provided sufficient lead time or prevented the scale of impacts observed in the worst-affected areas, highlighting the limits of adaptation. In a rapidly warming Himalaya, increasingly extreme and complex hazards are exceeding adaptation capacity, resulting in loss and damage. This is occurring against a baseline of a high frequency of large earthquakes, which both destabilises slopes and hampers recovery from successive disasters.

• The immediate impacts of this cascading hazard were almost entirely dependent on exposure to hazard, whereas longer-term impacts (e.g. related to recovery, long-term health effects) are likely to vary based on socioeconomic vulnerability characteristics of the populations affected. In a high mountain context where habitable land is constrained, population is increasing, and economic activity is dependent on rivers, it would be very socially, economically and politically difficult to eliminate or even substantially reduce exposure in riverine valleys, representing a soft limit to adaptation.  

• The 26 August 2026 Rasuwa disaster was triggered by a large rock wall collapse from the Langtang Lirung mountain at 5,150 m asl., which also caused part of the overlying glacier to collapse. The resulting rock–ice avalanche rapidly transformed into a debris flood and then a water-dominated flash flood that traveled downstream at average speeds of 188 km/hr, causing extensive erosion and sediment deposition. The failure involved an exceptionally large volume of rock and ice that on impact with the ground released energy equivalent to a M5.5 earthquake. There are several possible contributing causes, as outlined in the following points.

• In 2015 an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 triggered a catastrophic rock–ice avalanche at Langtang Lirung and caused widespread damage across the region. Subsequent monitoring shows persistently elevated and, at high elevations, increased landslide activity, suggesting that earthquake shaking may have weakened the underlying rock mass over the long term. Although its specific contribution to the 2026 failure cannot yet be confirmed, the earthquake may have preconditioned the slope for failure, alongside geological and climatic factors.

• Warming and permafrost degradation likely weakened the source rock wall by increasing bedrock temperatures and thawing ice within fractures. Loss of ice bonding reduces fracture strength, while meltwater can increase water pressure and further destabilise pre-existing geological weaknesses. Thus, permafrost degradation may have acted as an additional climate-related factor preconditioning the slope for failure.

• Glaciers in the region have been losing mass for decades at a rate equivalent to more than half a metre of thinning per year. Since 2010 the rate of recession of the Langtang-Lirung glacier extent has accelerated, increasing from 0.5% per annum over the previous two centuries to 1-2.3% per annum in the past 16 years. Glacier thinning and retreat can reduce buttressing and alter stresses within adjacent rock walls, potentially weakening existing fractures and increasing slope instability. Combined with increased meltwater, these processes may have interacted to amplify the compound event. 

• Precipitation can provide an additional short-timescale forcing. As temperatures rise, the rain–snow transition moves upward, increasing the fraction of rain falling as snow at higher elevations. Rain produces an immediate liquid-water input to the slope, whereas snowfall temporarily stores water at the surface. Intense or prolonged rainfall can therefore rapidly increase water supply to fractures and potentially increase fracture-water pressure. At the rock-ice-avalanche location,  stations recorded exceptionally high precipitation during October 2025, which combined with subsequent warmth may have been a source for meltwater during the following spring and monsoon seasons. There is also a tendency of the greater fraction of precipitation falling as rain than snow in recent years. This means there can be an increase in the amount of water stored in the land under the avalanche site, even in the absence of anomalously high total precipitation. 

• Observations show unusually warm conditions before the failure, supporting enhanced snow and ice melt and more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow. The slope failure on August 26th occurred against the backdrop of a warm 12 month period from September 2025-August 2026, with the warmest two months of the year (July and August) directly preceding the event also substantially warmer than the climatological average. These conditions were anomalous at the location of the slope failure itself and across the wider Himalayan region.

• We also analysed the height of the 0°C isotherm, finding that it has shifted to higher elevations consistent with global warming, with particularly strong trends observed during the Monsoon and Postmonsoon seasons. This progressive upward retreat of the freezing threshold is on the order of 100m/decade in recent decades in the Monsoon and Postmonsoon season. This is highly relevant as it can contribute to the degradation of high-elevation permafrost, glacial thinning and retreat, the snowfall-rainfall transition, and associated slope instability.

• When analysing how these conditions were different in a 1.4°C cooler preindustrial climate, using the standard WWA attribution framework that compares possible weather in today’s climate with possible weather in a 1.4°C cooler preindustrial climate using climate models and statistical models based on weather observations. We find in all datasets a significant increase in the likelihood and intensity of the very warm July-August temperatures at the gridcell nearest to the slope failure as well as in the wider region with an increase in temperature attributable to human-caused climate change during July and August of about 1.5°C, comparable to the level of global warming. Annually, the attributable increase is larger than global warming, at about 2°C. In individual winter months, the observed increase is as high as 3°C.

• We have not assessed whether this specific rock-ice avalanche would have occurred in the absence of human-induced climate change. Such a direct attribution requires additional evidence linking atmospheric conditions to subsurface temperatures, fracture-water pressures and the mechanical evolution of the slope. However, rapidly rising temperatures at a rate beyond the global mean as a result of fossil fuel emissions increase the likelihood and severity of such hazards in the Himalayas.

• Significant progress in adaptation is needed, particularly through strengthened high Himalaya earth observation, hazard monitoring, risk communication  and transboundary data and knowledge sharing. But events of this magnitude ultimately exceed the limits of adaptation. Addressing unfolding and imminent loss and damage, through recovery and reconstruction support in impacted communities, has now become an unavoidable part of climate response. 

• Minimising future risk requires a rapid transition away from fossil fuel use and delivering on climate finance commitments for adaptation. This is particularly important in the Himalaya and other high mountains, where glacier decline and permafrost degradation are expected to continue even without further warming, meaning that some of the impacts of past warming have yet to fully emerge.