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Himalayan Communities Are Relying on Centuries-Old Water Solutions In the Face of Climate Change
The word Laya describes the natural rhythm that has carried the people of the Himalayas through monsoons and drought for centuries. Across the peaks and glaciers, the populated mid-hills and the foothills, communities have harmonized their calendars to the pulsing of water.
Where annual rain falls in just four months, these master engineers funnel rooftop rainwater through handmade bamboo piping into gravel pits to recharge underground wells, maintaining them at the annual festivals. They adapt to the climate by unearthing ancient subterranean medieval stone spout networks for drinking, washing, and bathing.
But there’s another Sanskrit word used in Hindi called Pralaya, passed down through oral tradition like Himalayan myth. It means the melting away of places that no longer exist.
“Recent flooding in Nepal was a pralaya,” says hydrometeorologist and environmental scientist Ngamindra Dahal, chairperson of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF) and executive board member of the South Asian Meteorological Association. “We’ve never witnessed anything like it.”
Himalayans have fallen out of sync with nature at no fault of their own. As earth’s largest swath of ice outside the poles thaws from the unprecedented rapid global warming, high- and mid-mountain villages across eight countries of the Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain regions have entered a new world of extremes: too little and too much water.
The Himalayas are losing glacier mass 65% faster than a decade ago. The impacts will be felt by 2 billion Asians across 12 major downstream river basins by 2050. And by 2100, it’s projected that 80% of glacier mass will be lost. The reality of dangerous cloudburst floods and water scarcity is, however, already being felt.
On Aug. 26, a 55 million-ton, 93-m.p.h. ice-rock avalanche triggered by a glacier collapse in Nepal near the Tibet border killed more than 1,400 people, with thousands more still missing. Meanwhile, the Nepali government will drain four massive glacial lakes to reduce the danger of yet another catastrophic flood.
The vulnerable, historically low-polluting country has been waiting for a response to its request for compensation from high-emitting nations for the damage created in part by this climate disaster. And on Oct. 22, Nepal became the first country approved for a provisional payout from the U.N.’s Loss and Damage Fund, securing over $21.6 million for recovery from the catastrophic floods. Meanwhile, with deepening uncertainty about the planet’s most basic natural resource, Himalayan people forge on charting their own solutions to save their homes by reviving ancient water systems, building artificial glaciers, and uncovering hidden flood risks.
“The Himalaya is often described as Asia's water tower, but that metaphor is dangerously passive if it makes the mountains sound like a stable reservoir. What the laya-to-pralaya concept clarifies is that the Himalaya is a living, dynamic system—and that climate change is compressing geological time,” says Dahal. “What once happened across generations may now happen within one.”
Reviving Lifelines
For centuries, perennial springs, or mool, have dictated how Himalayan communities live their lives. But that trusted relationship is breaking down. Still, resilient Nepali communities are adapting to the shifting environment of melting snow and ice and unpredictable monsoon rain by reclaiming historic infrastructure.
To combat water shortages often from erratic rainfall shifts disrupted by climate change, they’re reviving an ancient network of underground terracotta canals that channel water to sunken stone spouts, some chiseled as early as the 6th century. Known as hiti or dhara, these water systems connect to ponds that absorb monsoon rain, recharging the groundwater table to keep spouts flowing during dry season. In places like the Kathmandu Valley, local governments are actively restoring and rerouting this massive ancient spring network, originally engineered by the Licchavi and Malla dynasties and now threatened by climate change and rapid urbanization.
Through the NWCF and an intergovernmental organization protecting mountain environments and cultures called the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, Dahal is replenishing water supplies by taking inventory of more recent drying springs to gauge a new baseline of water availability.
"A community may have adequate water in its landscape but lack the investment to bring it to households,” says Dahal. “Conversely, a community may have taps everywhere but an increasingly unreliable source.”
He’s teaching local communities how to revive and reroute their drying life sources based on changing water movement underground, by tracking seasonal flow rates, water quality, and geographic elevations. Once new water patterns are mapped, Dahal helps communities design localized water-sharing agreements and storage, and adapt household rainwater harvesting systems—in a grass-roots water governance model aligned with the Nepal government adaptation plan. “When a pipe breaks, you repair the pipe; when a tank collapses, you rebuild the tank,” says Dahal. “But when the spring itself stops flowing, repairing the infrastructure solves nothing.”
Hidden Risk
Up in Nepal’s Limi Valley, families are confronting a different kind of uncertainty. Tashi Lhazom recalls being 13, studying at a Kathmandu boarding school, when she received a phone call from her remote high-alpine village. On the other line her mother simply said, “You better study hard because you have nothing to eat here anymore.”
An avalanche had struck her 1,000 year-old ancestral valley—just two years after a massive glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), a sudden violent release of water from a melting glacial lake—and had taken with hundreds of the yaks that were her nomadic herding family’s generational livelihood. This went against everything Limi Valley indigenous villagers had known about trusting the mountain Gods.
“My people believed the Gods were angry with them for being greedy. That was their cultural rationalization,” explains Lhazom, now 26. When what villagers assumed was another catastrophic GLOF washed away bridges and a hydropower plant in the Limi Valley in May 2025, Lhazom was ready to do something about it.
“I couldn’t let the community blame itself for something it was not responsible when I knew it was those emitting greenhouse gases who were partially to blame,” says Lhazom, one of the first from Limi Valley to earn a college degree and now an activist among a wave of Gen Zs fighting climate destruction in Nepal.
She tracked down climate scientists and politicians, urging them to investigate the cause of the flood, until a field team finally agreed to come. After Lhazom directed them around closed flooded roads to local water sources, they trekked upstream, reaching glacial terrain at 17,000 ft. to learn the truth: It wasn’t a GLOF this time.
Instead, thawing permafrost—the ice that acts as glue to bind mountain rock—was without warning, draining trapped small “thermokarst” lakes, releasing massive volumes of underground water down the slope. As a result of their investigation, that 2025 Limi Valley flood was reclassified as Nepal’s first-ever recorded thermokarst lake flood.
After sharing drone footage, photos, and satellite images with the scientists who proved the flood mechanism, Lhazom became co-author of a September 2025 comment paper in the Communications Earth and Environment Journal alerting the world to this overlooked risk.
It led to an acknowledgement and warning in a July 2026 scientific paper about the increased risk of thermokarst lake floods due to climate change—not just in the Himalayas, but across Peru, China, and other high-alpine mountain environments. And from it, a newly defined dangerous hazard category, called Small Alpine Lake Outbursts (SALOs), emerged.
“Limi is fortunate enough to know they are in danger, but there are hundreds of ‘Limi Valleys’ across the Himalaya. There are still villages whose mountains have not been studied. They don't know if they are living in danger or not,” says Lhazom, whose 2024 film documenting the Limi Valley flooding, No Monastery No Village, was screened at Banff.
But most importantly to Lhazom, she was able to convince her Indigenous people of the Limi Valley that the flooding was not their fault. Since finally putting them on the map, Lhazom has been working to help secure government funds to resettle the remaining families away from danger on nearby ancestral land.
As Nepal’s politicians scramble after this year’s floods to reform the legal framework for disaster relocation, Lhazom is traveling high in the mountains to deliver relief for the victims among 33,000 now in need of permanent resettlement after being banned from rebuilding their homes along the permanently destabilized high-risk mountainside.
“The frozen water banks we know are melting, and that means flooding that can sweep an entire village away within a fraction of a second. Our water sources are getting thinner and fewer and that is a grave concern,” says Lhazom. “But what’s most heartbreaking for these mountain people is knowing they can never go home.”
Generational families have no choice but to accept the erasure of their ancient Indigenous settlements. “The mountain is more than land. It is our identity, our history. The water spirits we worship inspired our folk songs and Indigenous wisdom, and polluting means you are being disrespectful to the water spirits,” says Lhazom. “It’ll be a challenge to convince the people to live in safer places, but I don't want them to be in a place that could kill them.”
Growing Artificial Glaciers
Northwest of Lhazom’s home, in Ladakh, India, where –40°winds whip through a remote desert on an 11,500-ft. shelf in the shadow of the Himalaya’s highest northern peaks, the people rely on a single water source: melting glacial ice, now covered in soot from vehicles carrying adventure tourists acclimating in its capital of Leh.
The region’s unbearably beautiful and dry glacial-dependent settlements could become the next Himalayan ghost villages—joining the 2,000 already abandoned from drying glaciers, water scarcity, drought, and unpredictable monsoons in places like Spiti and the Uttarakhand, India, and the Upper Mustang of Nepal.
But here in the “Third Pole,” climate activist and mechanical engineer Sonam Wangchuk is blending modern technology with his traditional knowledge. In 2015, inspired by stories of his ancestors moving “parent” glaciers into a cave to make “baby” glaciers—based on the early work of “the Iceman of India”—Wangchuk developed the science to revive the ancient cultural practice of grafting glaciers. He grew new ice to reverse water scarcity in Ladakh.
He ran a mile a mile-long pipe from a glacier spring down a steep slope; at the bottom in the shade the water shot straight into the air and, in the dead of winter, froze. Over a month, the ice grew into a multistory conical artificial glacier fountain he called an ice stupa after the sacred Buddhist dome-shaped shrines. Rather than wasting down the mountain, his invention preserves a critical water supply for an extra month through June when farmers need it most for planting.
Word of Wangchuk’s ice storage traveled, and he built ice stupas in numerous Himalayan villages facing water scarcity, even allowing a community from Ladakh’s abandoned village of Kulum to return home.
Beneath this elegant solution lurked a critical flaw. The pipes feeding the stupas were freezing. But working with longtime colleague Surya Balasubramanian, who earned his PhD in Switzerland in ice reservoir behavior, Wangchuk last year brought the ice stupas back to life through automation. By integrating solar-powered, computer-controlled sensor networks and motorized valves, the water flow could be turned off remotely to prevent the pipes from icing, ensuring 80% of the incoming spring water is frozen and stored.
“We innovated a method to either spray water from fountains or drain the pipes using valves controlled by weather and pipeline sensors,” says Balasubramania, who in 2023 independently launched Acres of Ice to scale the ice stupas.
Today, they’ve built or supported 160 ice stupas across Ladakh, Nepal, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Chile, and Pakistan, each standing up to 12 stories and capable of storing 3.2 million gallons.
But the fight may never be over for Wangchuk, who knows the temporary nature of his adaptation strategy won’t outlive the glaciers. He is now testing a new application: sourcing water for his stupa from a dangerous glacial lake to help prevent it from collapsing and sending a massive GLOF wave down the mountain—and using natural refrigeration to refreeze the lakes.
With the growing threat of climate-induced glacier collapse, intensifying monsoons, and prolonged dry spells, the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region is nearing a tipping point. As global temperatures rise, the people who have learned to adapt to harsh conditions for centuries have little control over the destabilization of their ancestral homes. Still, they look to nature for a way forward through simple innovation to make every drop of water count. The question is: Will it be enough?
“There’s very little that can be done at this point to protect against glaciers in vulnerable places in the Himalayas, so these communities suffer and pay the price for what the rest of the world does,” says Wangchuk. “The recent avalanche in Nepal is an alarm bell for the rest of the world to mend our ways on this planet.”
