Nepal-China floods highlight a growing front of the climate change crisis

On August 26, a section of glacier collapsed at an altitude of more than 5,000 metres on the Nepalese side of the Himalayas. The falling ice and rock accelerated down a steep valley at about 50 metres per second, scouring debris and transforming into a high-speed Mudslide that slammed into Gyirong Port on the Chinese side just seven minutes later.The force of the flow largely buried and obliterated the border facilities. Hundreds of people, many of them travellers, remain missing on the Chinese side. Across the border in Nepal, entire villages were swept away, leaving hundreds dead and thousands unaccounted for.For decades, the defining image of Climate Vulnerability has been the low-lying island nation, where Rising Seas threaten to erase entire communities from the map. That threat is real, urgent and unfinished business. However, the catastrophic Mudslide that tore through the China-Nepal border forces us to look beyond the waterline and consider a more complex, multidimensional map of Climate Risk.