As international media attention fades from Nepal’s catastrophic August 2025 ice-rock avalanche and the floods that followed, researchers are urging policymakers to learn from the country’s past before locking in reconstruction decisions that will shape affected communities for generations. An estimated 33,000 Nepalis lost their homes in the disaster, which struck along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river valleys near the Nepal-Tibet border. Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has released a Rapid Disaster Needs Assessment outlining the scale of the challenge — but experts say the harder work of genuinely community-centred recovery is only beginning.
Drawing on research from Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, which left more than 800,000 homes in need of reconstruction, scholars warn that familiar mistakes are already at risk of being repeated. After the earthquake, reconstruction grants were tied primarily to property ownership, leaving many affected people ineligible for assistance — a flaw that deepened vulnerability rather than reducing it. The RDNA itself acknowledges that building ownership alone cannot identify all households requiring help, and that verification is especially difficult when documents have been permanently lost to floodwaters. Beneficiary identification, researchers argue, must be the first serious task of any recovery programme.
The question of where people will rebuild is equally fraught. Some households may be told their land is too hazardous to return to, pushing them toward so-called integrated settlements — collective relocations that were also attempted after the 2015 earthquake. Research found those settlements struggled most when planners failed to account for livelihood needs and caste-ethnic relationships within resettled communities. Relocation away from landslide- and flood-prone riverbanks can reduce physical exposure, but it does not resolve economic precarity. For many farmers, the land that sustained their livelihoods has simply been washed away, and rebuilding a house means little without nearby roads, schools, and markets.
Governance is another pressure point. Nepal’s 2015 constitution devolved disaster risk management responsibility to provincial and municipal bodies, but in the immediate aftermath of the floods, local authorities were overwhelmed and the national army led the response. Researchers argue it is now time to return decision-making power to the local level. The fifteen affected municipalities span communities with distinct cultural identities, economic dynamics, and disaster impacts — including areas where Indigenous peoples such as the Tamang make up between 38 and 90 percent of the population in nine municipalities. A federal “one-door” policy imposing uniform reconstruction requirements is unlikely to meet such varied needs. The RDNA itself notes that no household surveys, community consultations, or detailed engineering assessments were completed in the first three weeks after the flood — gaps that must urgently be filled through direct engagement with affected people, not just as informants but as political actors with the right to shape their own futures.
Underlying all of these decisions is a broader question about the model of development that concentrated roads, homes, and economic activity along hazardous Himalayan river corridors in the first place. Researchers say Nepal now has an opportunity — with international financial support — to move beyond the familiar mantra of “building back better” and instead build back differently: prioritising human-centred values, sustainability, and community autonomy while demanding climate justice from the global actors whose emissions have amplified these geophysical risks.