Nepal, Sept. 4 -- The Himalaya has never been a static landscape. Mountains rise and erode, glaciers advance and retreat, rivers shift their courses, and slopes fail. Nepal has always lived with these natural processes. What is changing today, however, is the context in which they are occurring. Rising temperatures, changing snow and ice conditions, retreating glaciers, evolving glacial lakes and increasing development in mountain environments are creating a more complex landscape of risk.

The question for Nepal is therefore whether Nepal is developing the scientific knowledge, monitoring systems and institutional capacity needed to understand what is changing in the mountains before those changes become disasters.

For a long time, floo...