Nepal’s floods: A warning and opportunity for universities

There are moments when a disaster stops being an event and becomes a question about the future. Nepal may be at such a moment.

The floods that tore through the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli corridor on 26 August took lives, buried settlements and destroyed roads, bridges, hydropower projects, homes and institutions. Their significance, however, may extend beyond the immediate devastation. They may offer an early glimpse of a future in which one disaster is followed by another, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

For generations, Nepalis have lived with floods, landslides and the unpredictability of the mountains. They have learnt where rivers rise, where slopes give way and when monsoon waters become dangerous.

Climate change is altering the conditions in which that accumulated experience operates. The question is no longer simply whether Nepal will face another flood but whether the assumptions on which its understanding of risk has been built are themselves changing.

Societies depend on assumptions of continuity. We build schools expecting children to return to them each morning. We build universities expecting students to complete their degrees. We construct roads expecting them to connect communities for decades. We send engineering students into professional settings expecting their education to prepare them for the future.

Academic calendars, examinations and institutional plans all rest on the quiet assumption that tomorrow will broadly resemble today.

A changing climate challenges that assumption.

A period of great uncertainty

The August disaster came with terrible simplicity: something happened in the mountains, water and debris came down and lives that had seemed ordinary only hours earlier were divided into before and after. The precise scientific explanation will continue to be studied.

But people do not need to be climate scientists to understand what the images are telling them. The mountains, rivers and settlements on which everyday life depends are entering a period of greater
uncertainty.

As of 9 September, 1,357 bodies have been recovered, while another 5,326 people are still missing. More than 13,500 people have been rescued and more than 6,800 injured. Behind these numbers are families waiting for news, communities trying to account for their people and institutions struggling to reopen a future that has been abruptly interrupted.

This is why the disaster should not be discussed only in the language of relief and reconstruction.

It raises a larger question: what kind of society must Nepal become if climate disruption is no longer an occasional interruption but a continuing condition of life?

Education is one of the places where that question becomes particularly important.

Caught in the same catastrophe

The education sector has been deeply affected. Education Cluster assessments in the worst-hit districts indicate that learning has been disrupted for roughly 14,000 children across 62 schools in Dhading, Nuwakot and Rasuwa.

Twenty-three schools suffered physical damage, while another 25 have been used as shelters. Other schools remain physically intact but are affected because teachers or students are missing.

The human losses are substantial. Across 27 schools, 436 students, teachers, education personnel and others were reported as missing or swept away/deceased, although verification is continuing.

Some educational buildings have also become part of the humanitarian response, serving as holding centres for displaced people and further interrupting learning.

This illustrates something often overlooked in education planning: a school is not simply a place where lessons take place. It is also a community space, a shelter and, in many places, an important social and institutional anchor.

Higher education experienced a different but equally revealing set of consequences. Available institution-level reporting from three affected university campuses indicates a combined enrolment of 2,217 students, with 31 students reported missing.

Separately, three fourth-year civil engineering students from Kathmandu University undertaking internships at the Upper Trishuli 3B hydropower project remain unaccounted for.

These figures are provisional and do not constitute a complete accounting of higher education losses across the affected region. But they expose an important reality: the university does not end at the campus gate.

The loss is larger than a damaged building.

After a disaster, educational loss is often measured through what can be counted – classrooms destroyed, laboratories damaged, books washed away and computers lost. Those losses matter. But they are only the visible part of the damage.

A college in a district such as Nuwakot or Rasuwa is more than a collection of buildings. It is part of the social infrastructure through which young people acquire qualifications, families pursue social mobility, communities develop professional capacity and public institutions acquire teachers, administrators, engineers and other skilled workers.

When students disappear, the loss is therefore not confined to a statistic. Educational trajectories that may have taken years to build are interrupted. Families may lose investments made over years.

Communities may lose future professionals. And where higher education institutions are among the few permanent knowledge institutions outside Kathmandu, their disruption can weaken the intellectual and professional capacity of the wider community.

This is why disaster risk cannot be understood simply by measuring physical destruction. It is also shaped by exposure, vulnerability, institutional capacity and the social relationships through which people experience a disaster.

The Sendai Framework reflects this broader understanding, emphasising the prevention of new risk, reduction of existing risk and strengthening of resilience rather than responding only after disaster strikes. UNESCO likewise approaches disaster-risk governance through institutions, coordination, knowledge, participation and long-term social resilience.

For higher education, the implication is significant: the educational institution itself must become part of the risk landscape. That is, universities are not outside the climate-risk landscape; they are part of it. Their campuses, students, staff, field placements and research activities can all be exposed to the same hazards affecting the wider community.

Education does not end at the campus boundary

The three Kathmandu University students bring this point into sharp relief. They were not studying inside a university building when they disappeared. They were undertaking professional training at a hydropower project.

That is increasingly characteristic of contemporary higher education. Engineering, medicine, agriculture, forestry, social work, education, architecture and many other disciplines depend on internships, field placements, laboratories, community work and professional attachments. The boundary between education and work is increasingly porous.

In Nepal, this matters because students are being educated for professions that operate precisely in environments exposed to environmental and infrastructural risks.

An engineering student working at a hydropower project is not merely completing an academic requirement. The student is entering an occupational environment whose risks are themselves part of what engineering education needs to understand.

The disaster therefore exposes a deeper relationship between curriculum and reality. Climate risk cannot remain an abstract topic in an environmental studies course while students undertake professional learning in landscapes being transformed by climate, geology and infrastructure.

The need for wholesale climate literacy

This is where higher education’s responsibility extends beyond emergency response. UNESCO’s global work on higher education has emphasised the role of universities in addressing complex challenges such as climate change through research, teaching and community engagement. That proposition has particular relevance for Nepal.

Climate change is often treated primarily as an environmental issue. Its consequences, however, run through social institutions. A flood becomes an education issue when schools close; a labour issue when workers disappear; a health issue when communities are displaced; an infrastructure issue when hydropower projects, roads and bridges fail; and a higher education issue when students, campuses, researchers and professional placements are caught in the same risk system.

Climate education, therefore, cannot simply mean adding a course on climate change. What is needed is climate literacy across disciplines. Engineering students need to understand changing environmental risks. Economists need to understand climate-related losses.

Sociologists need to examine displacement and inequality. Planners need to understand changing hazard patterns. Education specialists need to plan for learning continuity after disasters. Public administrators need to understand risk governance.

The aim is not to turn every university programme into an environmental science programme. It is to recognise that climate change is becoming a condition within which professional knowledge is produced and applied.

Research must evolve as well. Nepal needs better knowledge of how changing mountain environments interact with settlements, infrastructure, hydropower development, migration, labour markets and public services. Universities can contribute through geology and hydrology but also through sociology, economics, public health, education, engineering, geography, law and public administration.

The flood therefore raises a question about how knowledge itself is organised.

A complex disaster rarely respects disciplinary boundaries. A hazard may begin on a mountain slope, but its consequences travel through rivers, roads, energy systems, labour markets, households, schools and institutions. Academic knowledge organised entirely within disciplinary compartments can struggle to respond to such interconnected realities.

Universities therefore need stronger multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches that connect scientific knowledge with communities, policy and education.

From a slogan to capacity

“Resilience” has become one of the most frequently used words in development policy. But resilience is meaningful only when it describes an actual capacity to anticipate, absorb, adapt and recover. For higher education, that capacity has several dimensions.

There is physical resilience: whether buildings, laboratories, libraries and equipment can withstand foreseeable hazards.

There is academic resilience: whether students can continue learning when campuses close, examinations are disrupted or families are displaced.

There is institutional resilience: whether records, student information, communication systems and decision-making can continue when normal administrative arrangements fail.

There is social resilience: whether students and staff have networks of support when they lose homes, relatives or livelihoods.

And there is epistemic resilience: whether institutions can learn from disasters and turn experience into new knowledge.

The last may be the most important – and the least visible.

A university that simply reconstructs the same building in the same way has restored infrastructure.

A university that asks why it was exposed, incorporates the findings into teaching and research, changes professional training, strengthens community partnerships and contributes to better public decisions has converted experience into knowledge. That is a different conception of recovery.

Universities as part of climate adaptation

The international discussion of sustainable higher education has increasingly moved towards a whole-institution approach. Climate and sustainability are not simply curriculum topics; they involve governance, infrastructure, research, teaching, operations and relationships with communities. That logic is particularly compelling in Nepal.

Universities are among the country’s most important repositories of scientific expertise. They educate the people who will design bridges, manage watersheds, build hydropower systems, teach future generations, administer municipalities and make public policy.

Their contribution to climate adaptation therefore extends far beyond producing climate scientists. Universities can become observatories of local environmental change, documenting changes in rivers, slopes, settlements and livelihoods.

They can work with municipalities to translate scientific information into planning and develop local disaster-risk maps. They can incorporate disaster scenarios into engineering and other professional education. They can treat field placements not simply as opportunities to accumulate professional experience but as settings in which students learn to identify and manage risk.

They can preserve community knowledge about previous floods, landslides and changing landscapes. And they can help transform disaster experience into public knowledge rather than allowing each disaster to become another isolated episode in national memory.

This is consistent with the broader direction of the Sendai Framework, in which risk governance depends upon knowledge, coordination, participation and learning across institutions.

What exactly is being rebuilt?

Nepal’s immediate priorities remain rescue, identification, relief and recovery. The scale of the disaster makes that unavoidable. But recovery will eventually raise a more difficult question: what exactly is being rebuilt?

If reconstruction means replacing the structures that existed before 26 August, Nepal may restore its educational infrastructure. If it also means rethinking how educational institutions understand climate risk, how professional education engages with hazardous environments, how research connects with local communities and how learning can continue through disruption, recovery can produce something more valuable.

This is a question that extends beyond Nepal. Across the world, universities are increasingly operating in environments shaped by floods, fires, heatwaves, storms, droughts, displacement and other forms of climate-related disruption.

The challenge is therefore not simply how to protect campuses from hazards. It is how higher education should rethink its role when the conditions surrounding learning, research and professional practice are changing.

Nepal’s experience offers a warning – and an opportunity. The flood has demonstrated the physical vulnerability of a Himalayan society. It has also exposed the vulnerability of the institutions through which that society prepares its next generation.

The educational consequences of climate disaster should therefore not be measured only in buildings, classrooms or examination schedules. They should also be measured in the knowledge, human capacity and institutional memory that a disaster can interrupt – and in the capacity of universities to turn that experience into knowledge for a more uncertain future.

Min Bahadur Bista is a former professor of education at Tribhuvan University, Nepal and a former education specialist with UNESCO, with experience across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. He currently works as an independent education consultant, specialising in education policy, governance and reform, and writes on global education issues.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.