Disaster relief is not climate justice

When a disaster strikes, the first duty is obvious: save lives, rescue the missing, provide shelter and ensure that affected families have food, medicine and security. But once the immediate emergency is over, a more difficult question begins: is relief enough?

Nepal’s catastrophic August 2026 glacier-related disaster has made that question painfully relevant. Recent scientific analysis indicates that climate change likely contributed to the conditions that destabilised the glacier and surrounding terrain, although scientists have also identified other contributing factors. The disaster has left more than 1,300 people dead and thousands missing, while destroying homes, roads, hydropower infrastructure and livelihoods. If a disaster of this scale is increasingly connected to a changing climate, should our legal and policy response remain limited to distributing relief after the destruction has already occurred?