Srinagar, Aug. 6 -- A government that rebuilds the same road after every flood is a government stuck in a loop it never asked for. That is the loop Jammu and Kashmir keeps running, and on Thursday, inside the Amar Singh Club, a room full of scientists, bankers and officials sat down to break it.

The gathering closed out a four day international conference on Nature Based Solutions for Climate Resilience and Livelihoods in the Himalayas, hosted by the Islamic University of Science and Technology.

The final session had a formal name, a High Level Policy Dialogue on Fiscal Diversification and Resilience, but the idea behind it was easy to follow: restore the wetlands, forests and rivers that once soaked up floods and slowed landslides, and...